On Sun, 26 Oct 2014 08:11:39 +1100
Chris Angelico
It might fragment the community to have multiple different binary distributions. But it ought to be possible for any person/organization to say "We're going to make our own build of Python, with these extension modules, built with this compiler, targeting this platform", and do everything from source. That might mean they can no longer take the short-cut of "download someone's MSVC-built extension and use it as-is", but they should be able to take anyone's extension and build it on their chosen compiler. Having MinGW as a formally supported platform would make life a lot easier for people who want to test CPython patches, for instance - my building and testing of PEP 463-enhanced Python was Linux-only,
And how do you know that it would have worked with MSVC if you only use MinGW? If you want to ensure compatibility with MSVC, you must build with MSVC. There's no working around that. Regards Antoine.