MinGW and Python

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Edward Elliott wrote:
> Thanks for that very informative post!  To clarify, mingw (aka gcc
> -mno-cygwin) has no POSIX layer like cygwin.  Because your post could also
> be (incorrectly) interpreted to mean mingw removes the cygwin dll
> dependency by just linking it in statically.  But I googled and this is not
> the case.

Well, you are not compiling with neither mingw, nor cygwin; you are
compiling with gcc in either case.

The question is what C library (and header files) you use: with cygwin,
you use cygwin1.dll (and its header files); with mingw, you use
msvcrt.dll (or some other MS CRT), along with the a GNU version of the
Microsoft header files.

> Couldn't you compile the msvc-python code under gcc/mingw?  If the code
> sticks to C standards, and mingw can link to native libs, it should work. 

Well, there is no native C library on Microsoft Windows: the system
simply doesn't include an official C library (I know there is crtdll.dll
and msvcrt.dll, but these aren't "endorsed" system C libraries).

> The only problem is if python relies on some msvc-specific weirdness under
> msvc.  While there's much weirdness in msvc, I would expect a
> cross-platform app like python to stay away from it.

For Windows, that would require not to use any of the standard C
functionality, since the system doesn't provide that functionality out
of the box. So Python itself never uses and msvcrt weirdness (well,
some, but that could be dropped easily) - yet still, the Python
binary will depend on a specific version of the MS CRT.

Regards,
Martin