Python on Itanium Windows 64: available or planned?

[Martin v. Löwis]

Trent Mick <trentm at ActiveState.com> writes:

> There are no free binary packages kicking around out there that I know
> of but a number of people do compile it themselves for Win64.

However, there are free binary packages out there that you don't know
of :-)

http://www.dcl.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/home/loewis/python23.msi

See

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=mailman.1060265944.15612.clpa-moderators%40python.org

for the original announcement.

> There was some discussion on this list recently about how to do that
> seeing as there is no DevStudio for Win64 (at least, that is my
> understanding).

Again, it depends: With sf.net/projects/vsextcomp, VS 7.1 is very well
capable of invoking the Itanium platform SDK compiler (AMD64 coming
soon).

> > Windows 64 is a bit unusual in that "long" is not large enough to hold 
> > an address.
> 
> Yup. Though I would use a stronger word than "unusual". :)

That may even be a source of bugs. I'm in the process of putting
size_t in every place Python currently uses "int" or "long" to store a
number of bytes. In some cases, exceeding 4GB (sometimes 2GB) will
cause crashes in Python 2.3 (in other cases, this is somewhat overkill
- eg. when the compiler complains that strlen(some_file_name) may not
fit into 4 bytes).

Regards,
Martin