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["Martin v. Löwis"]

Brian Blais wrote:
> On Apr 12, 2010, at 16:36 , Martin v. Loewis wrote:
> 
>> If you are planning to build Python extension modules in the next five
>> years, I recommend that you obtain a copy of VS Express
> 
> Am I missing something here?  I have heard this before, but I have built
> extension modules many times under windows (using Cython) and never once
> used a MS product.

It's fine if your package supports being compiled with Mingw32. A lot of
source code can't be compiled this way, either because gcc doesn't
support some of the MS extensions (in particular wrt. COM), or because
Mingw32 doesn't provide the header files (in particular wrt. C++), or
because linking with a library is necessary that uses the MSVC mangling,
not the g++ one (again, for C++).

Code written in Cython should work fine with gcc indeed.

> It seems to
> work fine.  What is the basis of this claim that you need MS Visual
> Studio to do it?

Just try building Mark Hammond's Win32 extensions or PythonWin with
Mingw32 to see for yourself.

Regards,
Martin