[Python-Dev] mingw32 and gc-header weirdness

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 6:49 PM, Paul Moore<p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/7/22 Christian Tismer <tismer at stackless.com>:
>> Maybe the simple solution is to prevent building extensions
>> with mingw, if the python executable was not also built with it?
>> Then, all would be fine I guess.
>
> I have never had problems in practice with extensions built with mingw
> rather than MSVC - so while I'm not saying that the issue doesn't
> exist, it certainly doesn't affect all extensions, so disabling mingw
> support seems a bit of an extreme measure.

I am strongly against this as well. We build numpy with mingw on
windows, and disabling it would make my life even more miserable on
windows. One constant source of pain with MS compilers is when
supporting different versions of python - 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6 require a
different VS version (and free versions are available only for the
last version of VS usually).

I am far from a windows specialist, but I understand that quite a few
problems with mingw-built extensions with python are caused by some
Python decisions as well (the C API with runtime-dependent structures
like FILE, etc...). So mingw is not the only to blame :)

David