On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 3:17 PM, Hogan, Christopher <christopher.hogan@intel.com> wrote:

Hello,

We noticed there are classes in distutils for specific compilers like Borland, Cygwin, MSVC, etc., and are interested in creating a class for the Intel compiler. Is this something that the python developers/community would like to see, or would such a patch have a low chance for acceptance?

Hi, I don't have any weight to add one way or the other, but I have encountered a need for this in the past (though it was a long time ago and I can't recall the context). It might be tricky to get it accepted into distutils in the stdlib, if only because it would have to come with some promise of continued maintenance. And also getting anything added to distutils these days is hard (though last I recall the freeze may be liftable for non-backwards-compat-breaking new features where needed?) That said, you might have better luck adding it to setuptools instead, or a completely separate third-party package. Adding support for a new compiler that is *not* directly in the distutils package requires a bit of hackery though. Incidentally, d2to1 [1] actually supports packages that include their own compiler class, and allows them to use that compiler for builds. I don't know that this feature has ever actually been used, but my point in bringing it up is just to demonstrate that it can be done. And you can look at that code for an example of how to add a new compiler without it being directly in the distutils module (even if it's a bit of a hack). Best, Erik [1] https://github.com/embray/d2to1/blob/master/d2to1/util.py#L330