From: Guido van Rossum [mailto:guido@python.org]
If this means that those of us with VC6, and with no plans/reasons to upgrade can no longer build our own extensions, this would be a disaster.
Part of the offer was:
| Potentially we can even figure out how to enable anyone to | build Python using the freely downloadable compilers I mentioned | above...
Which is good news (don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see Microsoft supporting open source projects in this way). But wouldn't that imply unoptimised builds? I just checked:
cl /O2 Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Standard Compiler Version 13.00.9466 for 80x86 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1984-2001. All rights reserved.
cl : Command line warning D4029 : optimization is not available in the standard edition compiler So, specifically, if PythonLabs releases Python 2.3 built with MSVC7, and I want to build the latest version of PIL, (maybe because Fredrik hasn't released a binary version yet), do I have no way of getting an optimised build (I pick PIL deliberately, because I guess that image processing would benefit from optimisation, and in the past, PIL binaries have been relatively hard to obtain at times)? That's the problem I see, personally. I have VC6 because my employer uses Visual Studio for Visual Basic development. But VB has changed so much in the transition to .NET, that I don't believe they will ever going to VS7. So I will have to remain with VS6 (I'm never going to buy VS7 myself, just for this sort of job). Paul.