On Jul 7, 8:22 pm, "Martin v. Loewis" <mar...@v.loewis.de> wrote: > > I presume this problem would go away if future versions of Python > > itself were compiled on Windows with something like MinGW gcc. Also, > > this would solve the pain of Python developers attempting to > > redistribute py2exe versions of their programs (i.e. they have to own > > a Visual Studio license to legally be able to redistribute the > > required C runtime) I don't understand enough to know why Visual > > Studio was chosen instead of MinGW. Can anyone shed any light on that > > decision? > > sturlamolden has already given the primary reason: Python, > traditionally, attempts to use and work with the system vendor's > compiler. On Windows, that's MSC. It's typically the one that best knows > about platform details that other compilers might be unaware of. > > In addition, it's also the compiler and IDE that Windows developers (not > just Python core people, but also extension developers and embedders) > prefer to use, as it has quite good IDE support (in particular debugging > and code browsing). > > Perhaps more importantly, none of the other compilers is really an > alternative. GCC in particular cannot build the Win32 extensions, since > it doesn't support the COM and ATL C++ features that they rely on (and > may not support other MSC extensions, either). So the Win32 extensions > must be built with VS, which means Python itself needs to use the same > compiler. > > Likewise important: gcc/mingw is *not* a complete C compiler on Windows. > A complete C compiler would have to include a CRT (on Windows); mingw > doesn't (cygwin does, but I think you weren't proposing that Python be > built for cygwin - you can easily get cygwin Python anyway). Instead, > mingw relies on users having a CRT available to > them - and this will be a Microsoft one. So even if gcc was used, we > would have versioning issues with Microsoft CRTs, plus we would have to > rely on target systems including the right CRT, as we couldn't include > it in the distribution. > > HTH, > Martin
I see. Thanks very much to both of you for the info, much appreciated. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
