GCC 4.1.2 installer for Python distutils compilation

[David Rushby]

On Mar 18, 6:22 pm, Giovanni Bajo <n... at ask.me> wrote:
> On 18/03/2007 13.24, DavidRushbywrote:
>
> > Even though I have access to MSVC 7.1, so I don't really need MinGW
> > myself, [...]
>
> But remember that GCC 4.1.2 is almost 4 years newer than MSVC 7.1, and
> I found it to produce more optimized code (especially for C++). Since it's
> a free alternative, it might be worth to give it a go :)

I just wrote a high-performance Windows-1251 codec in C (an optimized
alternative to Python's including 'cp1251' codec).

On Windows 2000 / Prescott PIV, GCC 4.1.2 does indeed produce code
that is 30% faster than MSVC (this is with aggressive optimization
switch tinkering on both compilers).  This is for fairly simple, non-
floating-point C code.