That's essentially like Java's JRE. For what it's worth, on my PC the JRE is 196M in size. Whereas a full Python distribution is only 94M, and the embedded distribution is 15M. So I think Python already has that, more or less.
I hadn't realised that, so thanks :)
But my experience with the JRE is that very few applications actually use the "centralised" JRE, preferring to ship an embedded JRE. So the evidence from the Java world is that managing a central "runtime engine" is not actually as convenient as we're assuming, and the arguments for it simply aren't compelling in the real world. (Unix may have a different picture - there's a much stronger culture there of "depend on system packages" :shrug:) Paul
I imagine there would be a way to have an install install the runner if there is not one on the machine, and use the existing one if there is, and creating a venv in either case. Meaning that using the equivalent of an embedded JRE would be obsolete, no? I suppose my point is that having a utility for launching a python app from the desktop may be sufficient for a lot of use cases.