[Distutils] Adventures with x64, VS7 and VS8 on Windows

Mark Hammond mhammond at skippinet.com.au
Mon May 21 04:42:37 CEST 2007


Hi all,
  I hope the cross-post is appropriate.

  I've started playing with getting the pywin32 extensions building under
the AMD64 architecture.  I started building with Visual Studio 8 (it was
what I had handy) and I struck a few issues relating to the compiler version
that I thought worth sharing.

* In trying to build x64 from a 32bit VS7 (ie, cross-compiling via the
PCBuild directory), the python.exe project fails with:

    pythoncore fatal error LNK1112: module machine type 'X86' conflicts with
target machine type 'AMD64'

  is this a known issue, or am I doing something wrong?

* The PCBuild8 project files appear to work without modification (I only
tried native compilation here though, not a cross-compile) - however, unlike
the PCBuild directory, they place all binaries in a 'PCBuild8/x64'
directory.  While this means that its possible to build for multiple
architectures from the same source tree, it makes life harder for tools like
'distutils' - eg, distutils already knows about the 'PCBuild' directory, but
it knows nothing about either PCBuild8 or PCBuild8/x64.

A number of other build processes also know to look inside a PCBuild
directory (eg, Mozilla), so instead of formalizing PCBuild8, I think we
should merge PCBuild8 into PCBuild.  This could mean PCBuild/vs7 and
PCBuild/vs8 directories with the "project" files, but binaries would still
be generated in the 'PCBuild' (or PCBuild/x64) directory.  This would mean
the same tree isn't capable of hosting 2 builds from different VS compilers,
but I think that is reasonable (if it's a problem, just have multiple source
directories).  I understand that PCBuild8 is not "official", but in the
assumption that future versions of Python will use a compiler later than
VS7, it makes sense to me to clean this up now - what are others opinions on
this?

* Re the x64 directory used by the PCBuild8 process.  IMO, it makes sense to
generate x64 binaries to their own directory - my expectation is that
cross-compiling between platforms is a reasonable use-case, and we should
support multiple achitectures for the same compiler version.  This would
mean formalizing the x64 directory in both 'PCBuild' and distutils, and
leaving other external build processes to update as they support x64 builds.
Does this make sense?  Would this fatally break other scripts used for
packaging (eg, the MSI framework)?

* Wide characters in VS8: PC/pyconfig.h defines PY_UNICODE_TYPE as 'unsigned
short', which corresponds with both 'WCHAR' and 'wchar' in previous compiler
versions.  VS8 defines this as wchar_t, which I'm struggling to find a
formal definition for beyond being 2 bytes.  My problem is that code which
assumes a 'Py_UNICODE *' could be used in place of a 'WCHAR *' now fails.  I
believe the intent on Windows has always been "PyUNICODE == 'native
unicode'" - should PC/pyconfig.h reflect this (ie, should pyconfig.h grow a
version specific definition of PyUNICODE as wchar_t)?

* Finally, as something from left-field which may well take 12 months or
more to pull off - but would there be any interest to moving the Windows
build process to a cygwin environment based on the existing autoconf
scripts?  I know a couple of projects are doing this successfully, including
Mozilla, so it has precendent.  It does impose a greater burden on people
trying to build on Windows, but I'd suggest that in recent times, many
people who are likely to want to build Python on Windows are already likely
to have a cygwin environment.  Simpler mingw builds and nuking MSVC specific
build stuff are among the advantages this would bring.  It is not worth
adding this as "yet another windows build option" - so IMO it is only worth
progressing with if it became the "blessed" build process for windows - if
there is support for this, I'll work on it as the opportunity presents
itself...

I'm (obviously) only suggesting we do this on the trunk and am happy to make
all agreed changes - but I welcome all suggestions or critisisms of this
endeavour...

Cheers,

Mark



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