I wouldn't be surprised if astral's next product would be something like this. It's so obvious and there would be much interest from the ML crowd.

My current hobby language is janet. Creating a statically linked binary from a script in janet is trivial. You can even bring your own C libraries.

Zipapp comes close: https://docs.python.org/3/library/zipapp.html

uv doesn't support creating zipapps yet, but there is an issue with that. For that reason, I'm still using PDM.

I'm planning to distribute PAPER as a zipapp where the bootstrap script does some initial unpacking to put wheels in a temporary directory, then delegates to the contained code (similar to how the standard library `ensurepip` works). The code that creates the zipapp is in the repository and I'm thinking of genericizing that and making it separately available, too.

Although several variations on this theme already exist, I'm sure. https://github.com/pex-tool/pex/ is arguably one of them, but it's quite a bit bulkier than what I'm looking for.

Have you tried Nuitka? It takes a little effort but it can compile your Python program to a single executable that runs without network access.