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Some newbie questions the FAQs didn't answer!

Peter Hansen peter at engcorp.com
Wed Apr 2 15:28:06 EST 2003 
"Jason C." wrote:
> 
> I was thinking about taking Python up this summer.  I was initially
> drawn towards it because I had heard how easy it was to program GUIs
> using the various packages.  But then I read that in order to run a
> python program, the machine had to have the python VM installed, and
> the user had to go to a command line and type "python <program
> name>.py".
> 
> What I had planned to do was write Win32 GUIs, but I would guess that
> most common users don't have Python installed.  Is there some way to
> write the program in C++ and then have it bring up the GUI written in
> Python without Python being installed?  Wouldn't that require the code
> being compiled into machine code?

The usual approach is different.  You use a special utility (there
are at least several, called py2exe and the McMillan Installer)
to package the program into an executable which *bundles* the
Python runtime (i.e. the interpreter) much like other languages
do it.  Then your users just install that on their machine as they
do with any other Windows software and they're happy and unaware
that the program is written in Python (except for being happily
surprised with how robust the program is, and how quickly you respond
to new feature requests, for example ;-).

-Peter
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