How to install Python package from source on Windows

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 8:06 AM, Christian Gollwitzer <auriocus at gmx.de> wrote:
> Am 16.05.17 um 09:53 schrieb Chris Angelico:
>>
>> On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 5:14 PM, Christian Gollwitzer <auriocus at gmx.de>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> More likely would be the option to ship a C compiler with Python written
>>> in
>>> C. For C++ this is way too big, but a pure C compiler can be as small as
>>> 1MB. tcc has a liberal license, supports many platforms and gives
>>> reasonable
>>> (unoptimized) code.
>>
>>
>> To do that, Python would itself have to be compiled with tcc, or else
>> all memory de/allocation would have to be funneled through a
>> Python-provided API. And that's going to kill performance, I suspect.
>
>
> I don't understand this remark. Why would that be needed?
> The C ABI is well defined on the usual systems, and tcc is compatible with
> the respective compilers. You can link together objects from tcc, gcc and
> icc on Linux /OSX or tcc, MSVC and gcc on Windows without problems.
> tcc is *only* the compiler, not a library, so it will call out into the C
> library that Python is using.
>
> tcc even has a "JIT-mode" of operation (libtcc). For Tcl, there exists an
> extension which compiles C code to memory and executes directly from there.
> The same thing could be done for Python, too.

One of the complaints that bartc raised against clang was that it's
not self-contained - that it depends on some other stdlib. Yet he
espouses a tiny C compiler that obviously has the same limitation. On
my Linux boxes, I can grab GNU libc; but on Windows, where are you
going to get the header files and link-time libraries from? Oh right.
MSVC.

ChrisA