Portable software as a general rule is written in poor languages. AutoHotkey, AutoIt and NSIS are the three main languages in use, because they allow people to moderately easily produce not enormous binaries and have a surprisingly low initial learning curve (though later on you hit plenty of walls with them; none of them is suited as a general purpose programming language).

I speak this as the developer of the PortableApps.com Launcher, which I did in NSIS as the launchers already in use were NSIS, and as size matters a lot (that killed things like Python outright, though using the RPython parts of PyPy with the garbage collector ripped out would have worked---I checked it out and was able to successfully compile <100KB executables; D was disqualified for some reason I do not recall, Go for its heavy runtime even after ripping out the Unicode tables, &c.), and as I was not at all comfortable in C or C++ at the time.

Run Cmd With Admin Rights

I rather suspect that a large part of the reason for the apparently poor language choice is that the people that develop and use such things are strongly predominantly young people who are having to rove from computer to computer; as they get older, they tend to end up with a machine of their own and so no longer need portable apps. I don't any more, for example (and I don't use Windows any more either). The developers of these things are in consequence similarly young and have not yet learned good sense in programming (I include myself in that category, though I reckon the PortableApps.com Launcher to contain best-of-class engineer in the portable software space---five years later, at age 22, I am surprisingly unashamed of it, though now I would write it in Rust; I should try that one of these years).

Without

Virtualbox Without Admin Rights

Installing VirtualBox Without Administrator Rights. This is for discussing general topics about how to use VirtualBox. 4 posts. Page 1 of 1. Google Chrome installs without admin privileges, but it's only available for the user. It's a dirty solution IMO. There are other applications that can be installed without admin privileges.

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