[Python-Dev] MS VC 7 offer

[Williams, Gerald S (Jerry)]

There'll always be pressure to use VC for interoperability
reasons. Some would attribute this to FUD. I'm not ready to
go that far.

My personal (admittedly probably controversial) preference
would be to eventually drop VC support entirely in favor of
existing free optimizing compilers. Of course, if Microsoft
makes an optimizing compiler available for free to everyone,
it would make this position much more difficult to maintain.
Surprisingly, it sounds like the latter may be more likely
than the former.

If Python is moving toward VC7, I'd like to be counted in
for a copy. I'd rather not switch, but it sounds like I'd
have to, especially if there are legal issues with the VC7
runtime libraries.

Gerhard H=E4ring wrote:
> 1) Python can't be built with MINGW, yet. I'm working on it,=20
> and so are other people, apparently (search python-list).

Good point. We don't know the full extent of the issues yet.

> 2) The Microsoft IDE is a more productive development environment for =

> those that develop Python on Windows.

I'm not going to tell anyone that they can't use their IDE
of choice, but keep in mind that IDE !=3D compiler. Setting
up project files to use different build tools isn't hard.
If you're concerned about VC-specific debug information,
you could still use VC for debug builds.

gsw