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). 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. 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?