[Distutils] intelcompiler class in distutils

[Erik Bray]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 3:17 PM, Hogan, Christopher
<christopher.hogan at intel.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
>
>
> We noticed there are classes in distutils for specific compilers like
> Borland, Cygwin, MSVC, etc., and are interested in creating a class for the
> Intel compiler.  Is this something that the python developers/community
> would like to see, or would such a patch have a low chance for acceptance?

Hi,

I don't have any weight to add one way or the other, but I have
encountered a need for this in the past (though it was a long time ago
and I can't recall the context).  It might be tricky to get it
accepted into distutils in the stdlib, if only because it would have
to come with some promise of continued maintenance.  And also getting
anything added to distutils these days is hard (though last I recall
the freeze may be liftable for non-backwards-compat-breaking new
features where needed?)

That said, you might have better luck adding it to setuptools instead,
or a completely separate third-party package.  Adding support for a
new compiler that is *not* directly in the distutils package requires
a bit of hackery though.  Incidentally, d2to1 [1] actually supports
packages that include their own compiler class, and allows them to use
that compiler for builds.  I don't know that this feature has ever
actually been used, but my point in bringing it up is just to
demonstrate that it can be done.  And you can look at that code for an
example of how to add a new compiler without it being directly in the
distutils module (even if it's a bit of a hack).

Best,

Erik

[1] https://github.com/embray/d2to1/blob/master/d2to1/util.py#L330