[Python-Dev] Visual studio 2005 express now free
"Martin v. Löwis"
martin at v.loewis.de
Fri Apr 21 19:12:57 CEST 2006
Guido van Rossum wrote:
> Microsoft just announced that Visual Studio 2005 express will be free
> forever, including the IDE and the optimizing C++ compiler. (Not
> included in the "forever" clause are VS 2007 or later versions.)
>
> Does this make a difference for Python development for Windows?
For future versions, perhaps. For 2.5, I think we now have settled
on VS 2003, for several reasons:
- I personally consider VS 2005 still verdant (crude? immature?
unfledged?). They can't really mean the whole breakage they have
done to the C library. Also, I expect another release of VS
after Vista, to cover all the new .NET API, and I hope that
we can skip VS 2005 (although Vista gets delays, and so gets
VS 2007)
- Fredrik Lundh points out that it would be nice if people producing
extensions for multiple Python releases wouldn't need a separate
compiler for each release.
- Paul Moore has contributed a Python build procedure for the
free version of the 2003 compiler. This one is without IDE,
but still, it should allow people without a VS 2003 license
to work on Python itself; it should also be possible to develop
extensions with that compiler (although I haven't verified
that distutils would pick that up correctly).
Regards,
Martin
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