[Python-Dev] Status of C compilers for Python on Windows

[Guido van Rossum]

On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 1:10 PM, Ray Donnelly <mingw.android at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 6:13 PM, Steve Dower <Steve.Dower at microsoft.com>
> wrote:
> > Building CPython for Windows is not something that needs solving. The
> > culture on Windows is to redistribute binaries, not source, and both the
> > core team and a number of redistributors have this figured out (and it
> will
> > only become easier with VC14 and Python 3.5).
>
> This is the second time you've used the vacuous "culture on Windows"
> argument, now with an added appeal to (vague) authority. That may be
> your opinion and that of some others, but there's a large number of
> people who don't care for using non-Free tools. IMHO building CPython
> on Windows using Open Source toolchains is very much something that
> needs merging upstream and supporting by default. What is it that you
> are afraid of if CPython can be compiled out of the box using
> mingw/MinGW-w64? Why are you fighting so hard against having option.
> If CPython wants to truly call itself an Open Source project then I
> consider being able to compile and cross-compile it with capable Open
> Source toolchains on all major platforms a requirement.
>

Please stop this ridiculous argument. There's no definition of "truly open
source project" that has such a requirement, and if you took it to the
extreme you should not be using Windows at all. I appreciate your concern
that building Python for your favorite platform using your favorite
toolchain doesn't work, and if you have patches (or even bug reports) those
are appreciated. But please take your rhetoric about open source elsewhere.


> > I'd rather see this effort thrown behind compiling extensions, including
> > cross compilation. The ABI is well defined enough that any compiler
> should
> > be usable, especially once the new CRT is in use. However, there is work
> > needed to update the various tool chains to link to VC14's CRT and we
> need
> > to figure out the inconsistencies between tools so we can document and
> work
> > through them.
> >
> > Having different builds of CPython out there will only fragment the
> > community and hurt extension authors far more than it may seem to help.
>

Here's the crux of the matter. We want compiled extension modules
distributed via PyPI to work with the binaries distributed from python.org.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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