I certainly agree with your sentiment. Yet I'm unsure that even C# or C++ _by default_ builds .EXE files that can be copied onto another (same OS) machine and

I certainly agree with your sentiment. Yet I'm unsure that even C# or C++ _by default_ builds .EXE files that can be copied onto another (same OS) machine and run successfully (for C++ this is almost always possible, but IIRC not default build behavior). "What happened" was industry-wide standardization on dynamic-linking of prerequisite (library) code (IOW, this code stays in separate DLL files typically stored in system-global locations), leading to the need for "installer" software whose purpose (I presume; I've entirely avoided dealing with that stuff) is to ensure that all prerequisite dynamic libraries are upgraded to the minimum version needed by the SW being installed, replaces any old version(s) of the program with the new, and modifies the Windows Registry in various and sundry ways (can you say "system-global variables run amok"?). The solution which I prefer is to build static-linked .EXEs (binaries) instead of dynamic-linked. Convincing toolchains to do this is a small exercise for the reader. OBTW: I think go (golang) static-links by default. I stopped using TAWK compiler when I discovered Lua (5.1; IMHO a substantially better language than TAWK (this is not a criticism of TAWK)). I even went so far as to commission a "Lua Compiler" for Win32 which behaved almost identically to the TAWK compiler; I used this with great success for a few years. Unfortunately it was an internal tool which I lost access to when I departed that employer. P.S. IIRC Borland Delphi also builds static-linked EXEs by default. I wrote one Delphi 2 (Win NT 4.0 era) program whose source code I've kinda lost track of which still runs fine on Win10 x64. TAWK and Lua are more productive languages than Delphi/Pascal, and it's trivially easy to add your own C library functions to Lua (for improved performance or added functionality), so I gravitated toward an overall preference for Lua.