"W. Kent Starr" <elderburn / mindspring.com> writes:

> My personal take on deployment issues is consumer end-users.  These
> people want an easy install, which any application not distributed
> in compiled form does not deliver.

Well, that's not necessarily true.  The installation has to appear to
be a self-contained "compiled" program, but that doesn't mean the
application itself really has to be.  Although perhaps it's just
playing games with what "compiled" means.

A good example would be the Installer package available for Python for
building Windows applications, which packages up an application and
all associated modules and libraries into a compressed archive and
establishes a loader to access things from the archive.  But nothing
changes in the application itself - it's just packaging.  A small
bootstrap code brings in the interpreter and then executes the script
normally.

If you couple this with a standard installation program like the
excellent and free InnoSetup, than you end up with something that to
the end user is indistinguishable from a "normal compiled"
application, but that is still the same interpreted code, so the
application itself (and thus the language its written in) had no need
for a compiler.

--
-- David
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