Comparison to other Python builds

[seindum]

I just want to know if your Python have advantages or are better than other Python builds, and if so, what are they? One thing I noticed is yours uses [Clang 20.1.4 ] while others (in this case conda-forge) uses [GCC 14.3.0], but I am not sure what difference that makes.

[geofft]

There's some information about this in the docs: https://gregoryszorc.com/docs/python-build-standalone/main/ (I think we can make the docs answer this question a bit better though, I'll leave this open for a bit.)

A major practical difference from conda-forge is that this interpreter is designed to be compatible with the ecosystem of wheels on PyPI (i.e., the same ecosystem pip uses). Compiled wheels usually work in conda environments too, but my understanding is it's not the primary compatibility target and you need to use a conda environment to start with.

There are a few major differences compared to other builds you might see, e.g. around bundling all needed library dependencies so that it works on any system and around ensuring the builds are relocatable, but to be fair, the conda builds also do many of those (though as I understand it the approach is different for things like library dependencies).

I don't think the clang difference is particularly major; it hopefully produces a faster / optimized build (we also use LLVM's BOLT post-link optimizer), but it's compatible with compiled libraries built with GCC.