[Python-ideas] Update the required C compiler for Windows to a supported version.

[Nick Coghlan]

On 28 November 2013 04:24, Steve Dower <Steve.Dower at microsoft.com> wrote:
> The SDK needed for Python 3.3 and 3.4 (VC10) is even worse - there are many files missing. I'm hoping we'll be able to set up some sort of downloadable package/tool that will fix this. While we'd obviously love to move CPython onto our latest compilers, it's simply not possible (for good reason). Python 3.4 is presumably locked to VC10, but hopefully 3.5 will be able to use whichever version is current when that decision is made.

The main challenge we face on that front is the fact that Visual
Studio 2013 is Windows 7+ only, so we'd potentially be causing
problems for people still developing on XP or Vista if we update.

Windows XP goes EOL next month, so that will be dropped for 3.5 next
year in accordance with PEP 11.

However, Vista is still in extended support until 2017 - under the
current PEP 11 guidelines, that means it will be supported for at
least 3.5, and likely 3.6 as well. If we update the required compiler
we'd end up in a situation where CPython 3.5 nominally supports Vista,
but Vista users would still need at least one Windows 7 machine to
install the toolchain to create compatible C extensions. That may be
OK given the number of people that jumped straight from XP to Windows
7, but it's still a consideration that would need to be taken into
account.

Longer term, we'd love to add a build farm to PyPI to take the
drudgery out of creating pre-compiled wheel files (and MSI installers
for Windows), and that would potentially address this problem as well
(since the build farm would include the requisite Windows 7 images).
However, I currently think it would be rather optimistic to assume
that we'll have that in place by the time 3.5 rolls around (there's a
lot of other things that need to be addressed before a build farm will
make it to the top of the distutils-sig todo list).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia