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[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In message <mailman.1949.1271443668.23598.python-list at python.org>, "Martin 
v. Löwis" wrote:

> Brian Blais wrote:
>
>> On Apr 12, 2010, at 16:36 , Martin v. Loewis is 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) ...

But then such code will not be portable to anything but Windows.

> ... 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.