Which compiler will Python 2.5 / Windows (Intel) be built with?

[meyer at mesw.de]

Hi everyone,

which compiler will Python 2.5 on Windows (Intel) be built with? I
notice that Python 2.4 apparently has been built with the VS2003
toolkit compiler, and I read a post from Scott David Daniels [1] where
he said that probably the VS2003 toolkit will be used for Python 2.5
again. However, even before the release of Python 2.5, I cannot seem to
find many retailers around here that still carry Visual Studio 2003,
and some were a bit surprised about my request since Visual Studio 2005
has been available for some months now. Even more importantly, there
does not seem to be an official way to still get the 2003 toolkit from
Microsoft. The site where it used to be available [2] now redirects you
to the 2005 toolkit. The 2003 toolkit also seems to have disappeared
from the browseable downloads on the Microsoft page. Searching for
VCToolkitSetup.exe on the net, I found a few pages that still appear to
carry the file, but most are down or just redirect to a broken link on
the Microsoft site. That means that if Python 2.5 will be based on the
2003 toolkit compiler, it will be increasingly difficult to get a
compiler for extensions.

Since we have some Python extensions here that use MFC internally (MFC
is only available in the retail version of Visual Studio .NET), we need
to know in which compiler we have to invest to keep our extensions
compatible with Python 2.5. Furthermore, since we also have legacy C++
applications that link to the same libraries that are also used in the
Python extensions, we would be disappointed when we now had to switch
to Visual Studio 2003 just to be compatible with Python 2.5, loosing
official support from Microsoft in near future, and having to use an
outdated compiler throughout the lifetime of Python 2.5.

Thanks in advance for your comments!
Markus Meyer

[1] Google Groups: Python 2.5 Schedule (18 messages)
http://groups.google.ca/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/2f8be89236999a37/f6f95174484c24cc?hl=en

[2] Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit 2003
http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/