Tom Stambaugh wrote: >> I'm not entirely sure why you think Pyrex should "contain a compiler". >> It certainly works well enough with the free [beer] MS VS 2008 Express >> and I'm fairly sure it's fine with MingW. Both of those are readily >> available and I don't imagine anyone who's going to use Pyrex / Cython / >> ShedSkin is going to baulk at downloading a compiler set :) > > Anything like this is a lot more attractive to me if I can download and > install a binary without *needing* a compiler. Most of the time, I just want > something to run -- I don't want to risk diving in compiler-hell if I can > avoid it. It isn't downloading the compiler set that worries me, it's that I > almost never even want to think about it.
I certainly sympathise with the compiler-hell syndrome here: the subject of compiling Python itself and its extensions under Windows has long been a source of questions and qualified answers on the Python lists. This cuts both ways: Python itself is effectively only buildable with the MS tools [1] (notwithstanding some valiant efforts to provide patchsets so that it builds under MingW [2]). On the other hand, some useful libraries, say ffmpeg, only *won't* build with the MS tools[3]. Both sides of that debate have a valid position, but it doesn't ultimately help the developers. Which is probably why avbin/pyglet[4] took the decoupled route and used ctypes to join the two together! In the case of a general extension (like simpleJSON or PIL etc.) I'm usually just after a binary. In the case of Pyrex, though, the Pyrex code *itself* is pure Python; it's the code it generates which is C -- one step further away. Granted, it might be possible to produce some sort of bundle which shipped a MingW-based extension along with the Pyrex release bundle, but my own philosophy is that, if you've got to the point of using Pyrex then downloading a compiler isn't going to be too much work. It's clear, though, from the posts in this thread, that other people don't necessarily agree. Admittedly I have the advantage of being a professional programmer who is therefore bound to know what a compiler *is*! TJG [1] http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Python/comp.lang.python/2006-04/msg03627.html [2] http://jove.prohosting.com/iwave/ipython/pyMinGW.html [3] http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/faq.html#SEC36 [4] http://code.google.com/p/avbin/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
