The initial release of PyOxidizer generated a bit of excitement across the Internet! The post was commented on heavily in various forums and my phone was constantly buzzing from all the Twitter activity. There has been a steady stream of GitHub Issues for the project, which I consider a good sign. So thank you everybody for the support and encouragement! And especially thank you to everyone who filed an issue or submitted a pull request!

While I don't usually read the comments, I was looking at various forums posting about PyOxidizer to see what reactions were like. A common negative theme was the lack of C extension support in PyOxidizer. People seemed dismissive of PyOxidizer because it didn't support C extensions. Despite the documentation stating that the feature was planned and that I had an idea for how to implement it, people seemed pessimistic. Perhaps I didn't adequately communicate that making C extensions work is actually a subset of the already-solved single file executable problem and therefore was already a solved problem at the technical level (only the integration with the Python and PyOxidizer build systems was missing). So in my mind C extension support was only a matter of time and the only open question was how many hacks would be needed to make it work, not whether it would work.

Well, I'm pleased to report that the just-released version 0.2 of PyOxidizer supports C extensions on Windows, macOS, and Linux. If you install a Python package through a pip-install-simple, pip-requirements-file, or setup-py-install packaging rule, C extensions will be compiled in a special way that enables them to be embedded in the same binary containing Python itself. I've tested it with the zope.interface, zstandard, and mercurial packages and it seems to work (although Mercurial has other issues that prevent it from being packaged as a PyOxidizer application - but the C extensions do compile).

There are some limitations to the support, however. I'm pretty confident the limitations can be eliminated given enough time. Given how many people were hung up on the lack of C extensions and were seemingly writing off PyOxidizer thinking it was snake oil or something, I wanted to deliver basic C extension support to curtail this line of criticism. Perfect is the enemy of good and hopefully basic C extension support is good enough to ease concerns about PyOxidizer's viability.

Also in PyOxidizer 0.2 are some minor new features, like the --pip-install and --python-code flags to pyoxidizer init. These allow you to generate a pyoxidizer.toml file pre-configured to install some packages from pip and run custom Python code. So now applications can be created and built with a one-liner without having to edit a pyoxidizer.toml file!

The full release notes are available. As always, please keep filing issues. I'm particularly interested in hearing about packages whose C extensions don't work properly.