If a selling point is run from "one file", that's quite difficult to do in python. There are things like pyinstaller but you end up shipping the entire interpreter in the bundle.
As I recall, pex doesn't package up the runtime. It essentially packages up your venv, code, and resources and runs them under an installed runtime. It makes use of a relatively unknown bit of python functionality, which is that CPython will try to treat a zip file as a valid python script.
oh wow thanks i didn't know about this. in that case it would be super simple for me to wrap up a FastAPI server with SQLite or even some in-memory database that runs elsewhere, deliver as a single file!
Yeah this kind of thing was common when I worked at Twitter (where AFAIK pex/pants was developed) on an infrastructure team. It's a cool tool that few outside of Twitter seem to be aware of.
The result? The dozens of hours of preparation I put into the talk for the 200 people in the room ends up getting viewed by hundreds of thousands of people online.
As the author of a popular ULID implementation in python[1], the spec has no stewardship anymore. The specification repo[2] has plenty of open issues and no real guidance or communication beyond language implementation authors discussing corner cases and the gaps in the spec. The monotonic functionality is ambiguous (at best), doesn't consider distributed id generation, and is implemented differently per-language [3].
Functionally, UUIDv7 might be the _same_ but the hope would be for a more rigid specification for interoperability.
I've bee using ULIDs in python for about a year now and so far have been super happy with them, so a) thank you for maintaining this! b) I always felt a bit uneasy about the way the spec describes the monotonicity component. Personally I just rely on the random aspect as I am fortunate enough to say that two events in the same millisecond are effectively simultaneous.
At that point, it's basically just UUID7 with Crockford base32 encoding, more or less.
IMHO the in-process monotonically increasing feature of ULID is misguided. As you mention, distributed ids are a pain. The instant you start talking distributed, monotonic counters or orderable events (two threads count as distributed in this case), you need to talk things like Lamport clocks or other hybrid clock strategies. It's better to reach for the right tools in this case, vs half-baked monotonic-only-in-this-process vague guarantee.
