This is mostly due to ease of distribution. The binary is self-contained, no need to ship anything but the binary itself. You can also compile locally and then

This is mostly due to ease of distribution. The binary is self-contained, no need to ship anything but the binary itself. You can also compile locally and then run it elsewhere that is a completely different flavor of Linux. Quite handy when experimenting. Finally, no dependency on libc enables easy cross-compilation. You might not even have libc installed for the architecture you are targeting!