/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/bin/python3 和 /usr/local/bin/python3 中的 Python 有什么区别

Question

I recently formatted my Macbook and I only remember downloading Python3 once. So when I went to change my interpreter path, it shows 2 different Python3 paths. I'm aware that the one on top is installed on my system by default, but as for the bottom two, I'm not too sure what are the differences between them.

Answer 1

The 1st one (Python2.7) is the system default/built-in Python.

The middle one (Python3, /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/ ) is what you usually get when you install Python from the Python Releases for Mac OS X downloads page from python.org, using the macOS installer (something like a python-3.8.7-macosx10.9-1.pkg ).

The bottom one (Python3, /usr/local/bin/python3 ) is what you usually get when you use Homebrew to install Python: https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-and-Python .

~$ brew info python3
python@3.9: stable 3.9.1 (bottled)
...
Python has been installed as
  /usr/local/bin/python3
...
You can install Python packages with
  pip3 install <package>
They will install into the site-package directory
  /usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages

See: https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-and-Python

There is no difference in terms of functionality between the python.org one and the Homebrew one. If you installed the same version, they should work the same. The only difference, aside from the paths, is when you need to upgrade and/or remove your installation (ex. going from python3.8 to python3.9), something easily done with Homebrew using brew upgrade python3 and brew uninstall python3 .

As to why VS Code finds those Python interpreters, see the section on the VS Code docs for where the extension looks for environments , which lists among those " Standard install paths such as /usr/local/bin , /usr/sbin , /sbin , c:\\python27 , c:\\python36 , etc ".