Pure Python was a huge selling point back when using a compiled library involved downloading and running random .exe files from someone's personal page on a university website. It is much less of a selling point now that we have binary wheels and uv/Poetry/etc. that create cross-platform lock files.

I feel nostalgic seeing (a mirror of) that download page again, but that era was such a pain.

Mirror: http://qiniucdn.star-lai.cn/portal/2016/09/05/tu3p2vd4znn

I always thought the selling point of Pure Python was that you might be running on some esoteric implementation of python, or hardware that the library maintainer didn't include binaries for.

I mean, I am glad wheels exist, they make things a lot easier for a lot of people. I just believed in the dream of targeting the language for maximum compatibility and hoping a better implementation would eventually run it faster.