Well, I just wanted to say that it is definitely possible for native-compiled languages to do things like that, mostly by just bundling up the compiler itself.

Well, I just wanted to say that it is definitely possible for native-compiled languages to do things like that, mostly by just bundling up the compiler itself. (Not sure about wasm, but looks like the article is a bit more generic than just about wasm.) One great example is SBCL, a Common Lisp implementation which only has an compiler, but provides REPL, `eval`, and `compile` functions as per the CL spec. For the question about the core of Python, I would consider that everything not tied to the external environment as Python. So `locals`, `eval`, `compile` must be provided to be called as a full-fledged Python. On the other hand, I won't include all of the stdlib functions in the definition of Python, like handling the file system or environment variables. Think about node and the web browser - both are JS runtimes and they share the core language (like `this` or `with`, which provides similar capabilities of `locals`, and `eval`), but provide different stdlibs based on the environment. (Node provides web servers, file server interactions, etc... and the web browser provides APIs to manipulate the DOM, attach event handlers, etc...)