Import libraries and Borland C (Was: Wholly unnecessary flame.)

[Martin von Loewis]

> It shouldn't be hard to point Borland C at the VC stdio headers and
> msvcrt.dll, but I don't actually know. This isn't a problem of differing
> compilers/linkers but of there being no one stdio on the platform with a
> frozen binary interface. Even Microsoft gives you three -- libc, libcmt,
> msvcrt.lib..

Well, they made an attempt with crtdll.dll in NT, but that seems to be
so broken that nobody uses it.

> Like Bruce Dodson later said, just don't pass FILE* across .dll boundaries.
> Likewise there's no guarantee of being able to delete/free new or malloced
> memory across .dll boundaries. At least not w/o specifying and making
> available functions to work with them. Or drop down to something more
> guaranteed, like CoTaskMemAlloc and CreateFile.

On the malloc/free front, I think python.dll is doing quite good: all
deallocations are done by the same extension module that did the
original allocation [somebody correct me if that is not the case].

On passing FILE*, there is a proposal to wrap the stdio routines with
Py functions, so extensions would always get the stdio library that
Python was built with.

Regards,
Martin