Hi David,
On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 3:02 PM, David Cournapeau
Hi,
I was wondering if we could finally move to a more recent version of compilers for official win32 installers. This would of course concern the next release cycle, not the ones where beta/rc are already in progress.
Basically, the pros: - we will have to move at some point - gcc 4.* seem less buggy, especially C++ and fortran. - no need to maintain msvcr90 vodoo The cons: - it will most likely break the ABI - we need to recompile atlas (but I can take care of it) - the biggest: it is difficult to combine gfortran with visual studio (more exactly you cannot link gfortran runtime to a visual studio executable). The only solution I could think of would be to recompile the gfortran runtime with Visual Studio, which for some reason does not sound very appealing :)
To get the datetime changes to work with MinGW, we already concluded that building with 4.x is more or less required (without recognizing some of the points you list above). Changes to mingw32ccompiler to fix compilation with 4.x went in in https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/156. It would be good if you could check those. It probably makes sense make this move for numpy 1.7. If this breaks the ABI then it would be easiest to make numpy 1.7 the minimum required version for scipy 0.11. The gfortran + VS issue sounds painful though. Cheers, Ralf