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

[Paul Moore]

On 27 October 2014 21:19, Steve Dower <Steve.Dower at microsoft.com> wrote:
>> No, we've been trying to establish whether the patches to build with mingw were
>> intended to produce such a compatible build. It's not clear, but so far it seems
>> that apparently that is *not* the intent (and worse, mingw-w64 may not even be
>> able to build viable executables that link with msvcr100 without some heavy
>> hacking, although that's still somewhat unclear).
>
> Unless there is also opposition to moving to VC14, I'd rather see the mingw
> projects invest in linking to those libraries. I believe they'll have a much easier
> time of it than worrying about VC10, and the investment will be worth more in
> the future as the public API of the CRT stops changing.

I think the point is that anything other than msvcrt is extra work,
because using msvcrt is coded into the guts of gcc (which in turn is
because msvcrt is apparently OK to consider as "part of the OS" in GPL
legality terms). So whether it's the vc10 libraries or the vc14 ones
is irrelevant - and mingw ships with the vc10 link library, so it's
easier to discuss the problem in terms of vc10. But yes, vc14 would be
the long term target.

Of course if the vc14 libs were deemed as "shipped with the OS" and/or
were named msvcrt.dll, then that would be different. But I assume
that's not what will happen.

Paul