To answer the OP's objection clearly - the usefulness of a single binary that works anywhere trumps any benefit from having a smaller binary, especially in 2014 when we have 1TB harddrives and 10Gbe connections.<p>Having python installed as a pre-req on most OSes doesn't even seem valid to me. For the project OP posted, any idiomatic python programmer today will most likely use the "requests" library, which isn't part of the stdlib.