Visual Studio not installed

[beliavsky at aol.com]

"Nick Smallbone" <nick at nick8325.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message news:<40f44f8a$0$7799$db0fefd9 at news.zen.co.uk>...

> > Your right, I'm not sure what I was asking either. I forgot that linux
> > versions would not be compiled by Visual Studio. (I've been sick and not
> > sleeping). I wonder if the windows version could be compiled with a free
> > C-compiler?
> 
> Should be - MinGW or Cygwin should work. I've compiled it with Watcom before
> (http://www.openwatcom.org). And you can get the compiler of Visual C++
> without the IDE - http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/.

I have read that the Intel C compiler (ICC) produces fast executables
(see http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-05/msg00021.html for example). It
is available for both Linux and Windows -- see
http://www.intel.com/software/products/compilers/. Has anyone tried to
compile CPython using ICC and compared the performance with the
current CPython binaries?