[Python-Dev] MS VC 7 offer

[Brian Quinlan]

> Please rest assured that they are definitely incompatible. People have
> been trying to combine VC7 extension modules with VC6, and got
> consistent crashes. The crashes occur as you pass FILE* across
> libraries: Neither C library can deal with FILE* (such as stdout)
> received from the other library.

Wouldn't this only affect extension modules using PyFile_FromFile and
PyFile_AsFile? And a little hackery could make those routines generate
exceptions if called from an incompatible VC version.

> > 2. Some 3rd party extension developers may have already released
> >    binaries for Python 2.3, based on the understanding that there 
> >    won't be any additional API changes after the first beta (baring
> >    a disaster).
> 
> There won't be any. That's any ABI change.

Isn't the ABI dependant on the API and linker? The API is supposed to be
stable at this point. I would imagine that most extension developers
would assume that the build environment is also stable at this point.

Cheers,
Brian