[Python-Dev] Re: No-cost optimizing VC 7.1

[Paul Moore]

"Tim Peters" <tim.one at comcast.net> writes:

> Thanks to David Abrahams for passing on this info:  a free optimizing
> cmdline VC 7.1 has been released by MS:
>
>     http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/
>
> The 32MB download appears to contain much of the meat of Visual Studio .NET
> 2003 Professional, including the compiler, linker, static-link libraries for
> the C, C++ & STL runtimes, and the .NET Common Language Runtime.

Sadly, a test seems to show that the /MD option links with msvcrt.dll,
and not with msvcr71.dll. So this still isn't of immediate use in
building Python extensions which will run against a standard Python
binary distribution.

This would tie in with the information given on the MS website: "C
Runtime Library and the C++ Standard Library, including the Standard
Template Library. These are the same static-link libraries included
with Visual Studio."

Note this bit........................^^^^^^^^^^^

I just checked my hard disk (I have MSVC6SP6, a recent platform SDK,
.NET framework and SDK, and the VC Toolkit 2003 installed) and I can't
find any occurrences of msvcr71.lib, implying that none of these tools
offers the possibility of creating code which links against
msvcr71.dll...

Another oddity - apparently a cast from float to long generates a call
to an internal function _ftol2, where it called _ftol in earlier
versions. So code that links with /MD fails to link if it contains
such a cast (as the compiler generates code to call support functions
which are not in the CRT DLL that is being used...)

Don't get me wrong - it's great that MS have done this, it's just not
the end of the story.

Paul.
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