[Python-Dev] Python 2.4 extensions require VC 7.1?

[Kristján V. Jónsson]

I remember you voicing this point at the Texas sprint.  I can't say I agree.  
The behaviour of certain function (like signal and fopen) is undefined for certain arguments.  Undefined is undefined, exiting the program with an admonition is one of the possible outcomes (as is formatting your hard drive.)
In my opinion this is to be considered "a good thing" since it helps us adhere to the "defined" parts of the standards and not rely on something which is utterly unknown or unpredictable by the standards (but which happens to work on some platforms, no thanks to the standards.)
Besides, we only found this an issue in three places:  signal(), fopen() and strftime() functions.  Not a huge thing to fix.

Apart from these things, I must say that in my experience VC2005 is an surprisingly stable product.  The whole program (link-step) optimization is a boon, and if combined with profile guided optimization (PGO), works wonders.

VS2005 also can create binaries for the X64 windows platform, no small point, and the primary reason we started using it in the first place.  I encourage people to look at the PCBuild8 directory in the current python trunk.  Especially I would like suggestions and comments on how to better automate the PGO build process

Cheers,
Kristján

-----Original Message-----
From: python-dev-bounces+kristjan=ccpgames.com at python.org [mailto:python-dev-bounces+kristjan=ccpgames.com at python.org] On Behalf Of "Martin v. Löwis"
Sent: 17. júní 2006 08:26
To: Scott Dial
Cc: Python Dev
Subject: Re: [Python-Dev] Python 2.4 extensions require VC 7.1?

Another reason is that I consider VS 2005 buggy, I hope that some
of the breakage that Microsoft has done to the C library is reverted
in a future release. VS2005 managed to break compatibility with
C89 and C99 in a way that made Python fail to start up, also, it
was possible to have the CRT abort just by calling the builtin open
with the wrong arguments. There is now a work-around for that breakage,
but still, I don't trust that VS 2005 is a good product.

I'm hoping that Python can skip VS 2005 entirely, and go straight
to VS 2007 (or whatever it will be called) for 2.6.