[Python-Dev] Compiler used to build Python for Windows

[Alexey Borzenkov]

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 3:52 AM, Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
>  Mingw tends to be rather more stable (though not itself without the
>  occasional library compatibility issue), and more freely available.

Not all extensions can be built using mingw (pywin32 comes to mind
immediately). And while you can almost easily (but not very easily,
since you need to patch libmoldname yourself and then update your spec
file) change runtime used by mingw, you cannot do so with Visual
Studio. Besides, this would require spec-editing on both, build
machines, as well as user machines (otherwise you get extensions that
depend on both msvcrt.dll and msvcrXX.dll), this is a complication
too. Runtime compatibility could be a potential problem (or maybe not,
if WITH_PYMALLOC maybe fixes that?), so official mingw port (as much
as I'd like for one to be there) does not seem feasible to me in any
future, Python is already too far on the needle of Visual Studio. :(

The biggest problem would also be with some extensions' setup.py. Many
extensions I've seen hardwire to distutils.msvccompiler in one way or
another. If official python would shift to mingw, they would suddenly
break.

I think the best lesson here is Tcl. Because it uses stubs mechanism,
you don't need to depend on tclXX.dll, you don't deal with really
direct implementation details, you don't care about runtimes,
everything is much easier. Maybe it's possible (and not too late) for
Python to somehow embrace such mechanism?