MinGW and Python

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Brian Elmegaard wrote:
>> That is simply not true. 
> 
> Actually, you answered me then too. I misunderstood after reading
> http://sebsauvage.net/python/mingw.html.
> 
> Is the information on that page not correct? Has it never been? 

It's not correct, to the best of my knowledge. However, since
very few people use it, support for mingw keeps breaking
(inadvertently), so there might be bugs that prevent it from
working *for you*.

At the point this was written (apparently around Python 2.2)
it was possible to build Python extensions with MingW (the page
actually explains you how to do that), so "Under Windows, if you
do not have the costly Microsoft Visual C++, you cannot
install Python extensions written in C" wasn't even true
at the time it was written. You couldn't use distutils, but
you could certainly have built extensions by invoking the
compiler manually.

There were times when cygwin couldn't link with .DLLs unless
they were created with GNU ld, but these times are long past
history.

Regards,
Martin