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

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 10:46 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29 October 2014 22:19, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:
>>> Yeah, I wondered about that. I'll work up a patch for that. But the
>>> more I think about it, it really is trivial:
>>
>> I am reminded of an interview question I was once asked which was prefaced
>> with: "Here's an easy one..."
>>
>> My reply was, if you know the answer, it's easy!
>
> Yeah, I know what you mean. My take on this is that I agree it's not
> easy if you don't know and can't get access to the information, but if
> you can, there's very little to it.

That's great, but yeah. In case it helps as a data point, I consider
myself a reasonably technical guy, probably more than your average
python package author -- 15 years of free software hacking, designed a
pretty popular X remote display protocol, helped invent DVCS, have
written patches to gcc and the kernel, numpy co-maintainer, etc. etc.

For the last ~12 months I've had an underlined and circled todo item
saying "make wheels for https://pypi.python.org/pypi/zs/", and every
time I've sat down and spent a few hours trying I've ended up utterly
defeated with a headache. Distutils is spaghetti, and Windows is
spaghetti (esp. if you've never used it for more than checking email
on a friend's laptop), and the toolchain setup is spaghetti, and then
suddenly people are talking about vcvarsall.bats and I don't know what
all. I honestly would totally benefit from one of those
talk-your-grandparents-through-it tutorials ("here's a screenshot of
the dialogue box, and I've drawn an arrow pointing at the 'ok' button.
You should press the 'ok' button.")

>>> - For non-free MSVC, install the appropriate version, and everything just
>>> works.
>>> - For Python 2.7 (32 or 64 bit), install the compiler for Python 2.7
>>> package and everything just works as long as you're using setuptools.
>>> - For 32 bit Python 3.2-3.4, install Visual Studio Express and
>>> everything just works.
>>> - For 64 bit Python 3.2-3.4, install the SDK, set some environment
>>> variables, and everything just works.

I think the SDK covers both 32 and 64 bit? If so then leaving visual
studio out of things entirely is probably simpler.

I'm also unsure how you even get both 32- and 64-bit versions of
python to coexist on the same system.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith
Postdoctoral researcher - Informatics - University of Edinburgh
http://vorpus.org