Agreed! JIT's are interesting but we use Cython in production to build Userify Enterprise (SSH key management) (self-hosted distributable). It works incredibly well and we are thrilled with the result. (We do require a bunch of third party pip installs rather than wrap them into the binary.) This was partly because one thing that we had trouble with was lots of imports, especially for (ironically) compiled C libraries. It's a lot easier and probably safer to just give a user a script of installs (or a requires manifest.) Someday soon we'll probably even make it installable via pip and bring things full circle. (We're exploring a free five server version.)
Userify's architecture is probably a bit unusual. It's distributed as a single binary that uses an external redis server for locking and stores data in either S3 or a local filesystem (NFS, EBS, iSCSI, etc.) When it first launches, it automatically installs any missing python prereqs (if pip is available) and explodes out a web server static file repo in case you want to front-end it with nginx (etc) and then starts up multiple web servers (HTTPS, HTTP, alternative ports, etc). We've found Python to work extremely well for all of this. We've looked at a few other languages that we think fit our core requirements (incl lua, scala, and haskell) but Python works pretty much perfectly for this use case, we can scale it horizontally using Redis as a synchronization mechanism, and the GIL hasn't caused any problems for us because we just add more processes as needed. Cython is really fantastic and 'just works'.
Things aren't perfect.. we're still on Python 2.x, but we're going to be moving forward as soon as all of the third-party libraries we rely on move to 3.
Userify's architecture is probably a bit unusual. It's distributed as a single binary that uses an external redis server for locking and stores data in either S3 or a local filesystem (NFS, EBS, iSCSI, etc.) When it first launches, it automatically installs any missing python prereqs (if pip is available) and explodes out a web server static file repo in case you want to front-end it with nginx (etc) and then starts up multiple web servers (HTTPS, HTTP, alternative ports, etc). We've found Python to work extremely well for all of this. We've looked at a few other languages that we think fit our core requirements (incl lua, scala, and haskell) but Python works pretty much perfectly for this use case, we can scale it horizontally using Redis as a synchronization mechanism, and the GIL hasn't caused any problems for us because we just add more processes as needed. Cython is really fantastic and 'just works'.
Things aren't perfect.. we're still on Python 2.x, but we're going to be moving forward as soon as all of the third-party libraries we rely on move to 3.