Shiv does not solve for what containers and Docker/Podman/Buildah/Containerd solve for: re-launching processes at boot and failure, launching processes in chroots or cgroups (with least privileges), limiting access to network ports, limiting access to the host filesystem, building chroots / images, [...]<p>You can run build tools like shiv with a RUN instruction in a Dockerfile and get <i>some</i> caching.<p>You can build a zipapp with shiv (in a build container) and run the zipapp in a container.<p>Should the zipapp contain the test suite(s) and test_requires so that the tests can be run in an environment most similar to production?<p>It's much easier to develop with code on the filesystem (instead of in a zipapp).<p>It's definitely faster to read the whole zipapp into RAM than to stat and read each imported module from the filesystem once at startup.<p>There may be a better post title than the current "Python Alternative to Docker"? Shiv is a packaging utility for building Python zipapps. Shiv is not an alternative to process isolation with containers (or VMs)