Single-file binaries are indeed important. (Though in most cases they don't have to be totally stand-alone -- they can depend on a system python and its stdlib. At least in typical datacenter setups.) Have people looked at PEX (a format developed by Twitter) or Pants (which seems to be an open-source tool that can build PEX files)?

Łukasz has told me that at Facebook they have a similar system that they are now using to deploy Python 3 binaries.

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--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)