I've created a step-by-step tutorial for compiling executables for distribution on a Raspberry Pi 3B or similar Raspbian platform. (There's no support for cross-compiling on a different operating system, however.)
The thought would be that you might want to protect your source code and just distribute an executable. This tutorial shows you how to do so in C, C++, Python, Go and NodeJS (JavaScript). There's a comparison of the resulting file sizes at the end.
In theory, this might be useful as something that runs under the control of an OctoPrint (OctoPi-imaged) instance.