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[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro
<ldo at geek-central.gen.new_zealand> wrote:

>> ... 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++).
>
> Again, that would be code that’s not portable off Windows.

Not really, part of the issue is that mingw uses ancient gcc (3.x
series), and g++ 3.x has poor C++ support compared to MSVC (or gcc
4.x).

There is also the issue that gcc debugging symbols are totally
incompatible with MSVC, so you cannot debug things from anything but
gdb. Gcc for win64 is also not that stable yet - when porting numpy
and scipy on windows 64, I got numerous issues with it.

None of this has anything to do with portability.

cheers,

David