[Distutils] Compiler support for VC++ 2005

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Fri Feb 2 15:39:31 CET 2007


On 02/02/07, Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:
> Fair enough, I wasn't aware of this. I *have* heard reports of problems
> for certain projects caused by extensions built with gcc on windows, but
> they seemed like corner cases. (One was a database project which passed
> file handles to the CRT - or something like that - IIRC.)

You could get issues with an extension which uses an external library.
If that external library's API returns things like file handles or
pointers to malloc'ed memory, *and* the external library is built to
use a CRT other than msvcr71, then you could have problems (which you
could fix by rebuilding the external library to use msvcr71). IIRC,
the gd library used to have issues like this. But it's very rare, in
my experience, and points to an issue with the external library,
rather than with the extension or distutils.

A much more common problem is extension code which relies on MSVC
features or libraries (for example pywin32) or which relies on
external libraries which only come in a compiled form compatible with
MSVC and which are too much of a pain to build yourself (wxPython
comes to mind here).

These days, I generally go with prebuilt binaries for anything 3rd
party, but I'd build my own extensions using mingw.

Paul.


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