It's free (VC Express 2008 is behind a pay wall these days) It's small (85MB download, 300mb on installed) It's a per-user install with no reboot required If you have the permissions, time, and access for VC Express 2008, it gains you nothing. You're not the intended target audience (I thought I had that wording in the announcement, but I guess not). Most people don't have or want Visual Studio installed on their machine, or need to install on a machine where they're not admin (think university student on a lab machine who needs Cython). Cheers, Steve Top-posted from my Windows Phone ________________________________ From: Piotr Dobrogost<mailto:p@2014.dobrogost.net> Sent: 9/27/2014 3:34 To: Steve Dower<mailto:Steve.Dower@microsoft.com> Cc: distutils sig<mailto:distutils-sig@python.org> Subject: Re: [Distutils] Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7 On Sep 27, 2014 12:32 AM, "Steve Dower" <Steve.Dower@microsoft.com<mailto:Steve.Dower@microsoft.com>> wrote:
I'll post this on the various other lists later, but I promised distutils-sig first taste, especially since the discussion has been raging for a few days (if you're following the setuptools repo, you may already know, but let me take the podium for a few minutes anyway :) )
Microsoft has released a compiler package for Python 2.7 to make it easier for people to build and distribute their C extension modules on Windows. The Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7 (a.k.a. VC9) is available from: http://aka.ms/vcpython27
This package contains all the tools and headers required to build C extension modules for Python 2.7 32-bit and 64-bit (note that some extension modules require 3rd party dependencies such as OpenSSL or libxml2 that are not included). Other versions of Python built with Visual C++ 2008 are also supported, so "Python 2.7" is just advertising - it'll work fine with 2.6 and 3.2
What that buys us in comparision to simply using VC 2008 Express?