On 25Sep2015 0824, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal wrote:
As I understand it, the MS VS2010 compiler is required (or at least best practice) for compiling Python extensions for the python.org Windows builds of py 3.4 and ?[1]
However, MS now makes it very hard (impossible?) to download VS2010 Express ( or Community, or whatever the free as in beer version is called).
This is the main motivation for moving to VS 2015 for Python 3.5. See https://docs.python.org/3.5/using/windows.html#compiling-python-on-windows (same link as [1] with the version changed) and also https://docs.python.org/3.5/whatsnew/3.5.html
I realize that this is not python-dev's responsibility, but if there is any way to either document where it can be found, or put a bit of pressure on MS to make it available, as they have for VS2008 and py2.7, that would be great.
I've applied that pressure already and it's not going to happen :( The best "solution" is to move to Py 3.5 asap. If you're writing an extension and are being careful, you can use a later compiler to build for 3.4 with Py_LIMITED_API set and a lot of care (did I mention you need to be careful? It's not just FILE* that will break...). Cheers, Steve
Sorry to bug this list, I didn't know where else to reach out to.
-Chris
[1] it's actually prefer hard to find out which compiler version is used for which python version. And has been for years. Would a patch to the docs, probably here:
https://docs.python.org/3.4/using/windows.html#compiling-python-on-windows
Be considered?