Can someone explain to me why Python 2.4 on MS Windows has these backward compatibility problems? What am I missing?
The problem is the Python C/API. At the moment, it exposes things directly (like data structures) that may change size between major version releases. The other issue is that the interpreter and the extensions may be linked to different versions of the Microsoft runtime.
This is a solvable problem, but it would require:
1. Major additions to the C/API - a "Python Major Version Agnostic" API that hides all data structures behind opaque pointers, never passes file descriptors between the interpreter and the extension and never gets Python to delete memory allocated by the extension (or vice-versa)
2. Rewriting extensions to use the new API functions instead of the current major version specific ones.
Such an API is likely to be both harder to work with and slower, simply due to the limitations of C.
To this date, no-one has cared enough about the problem to put in the effort required to make the C API version agnostic. Given that the API almost always remains *source* compatible, within a month or two of a new Python release, the extension developers have generally tweaked their build environments to also produce binaries for the new release.
In the current case (Python 2.4), the transition from msvcrt to msvcrt71, and the poor quality of the free development tools offered by Microsoft has exacerbated the problem on Windows. The Python developers are looking at improving the documentation and support for building extensions with Windows compilers other than Visual Studio .Net 2003 (mainly MinGW and the free MS tools).
Although key extension developers could always try asking the PSF to buy them a Visual Studio license ;)
Cheers, Nick.
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Nick Coghlan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Brisbane, Australia
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http://boredomandlaziness.skystorm.net
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