Download Microsoft C/C++ compiler for use with Python 2.6/2.7 ASAP

[Jonathan Hartley]

On Jul 7, 8:22 pm, "Martin v. Loewis" <mar... at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> > I presume this problem would go away if future versions of Python
> > itself were compiled on Windows with something like MinGW gcc. Also,
> > this would solve the pain of Python developers attempting to
> > redistribute py2exe versions of their programs (i.e. they have to own
> > a Visual Studio license to legally be able to redistribute the
> > required C runtime) I don't understand enough to know why Visual
> > Studio was chosen instead of MinGW. Can anyone shed any light on that
> > decision?
>
> sturlamolden has already given the primary reason: Python,
> traditionally, attempts to use and work with the system vendor's
> compiler. On Windows, that's MSC. It's typically the one that best knows
> about platform details that other compilers might be unaware of.
>
> In addition, it's also the compiler and IDE that Windows developers (not
> just Python core people, but also extension developers and embedders)
> prefer to use, as it has quite good IDE support (in particular debugging
> and code browsing).
>
> Perhaps more importantly, none of the other compilers is really an
> alternative. GCC in particular cannot build the Win32 extensions, since
> it doesn't support the COM and ATL C++ features that they rely on (and
> may not support other MSC extensions, either). So the Win32 extensions
> must be built with VS, which means Python itself needs to use the same
> compiler.
>
> Likewise important: gcc/mingw is *not* a complete C compiler on Windows.
> A complete C compiler would have to include a CRT (on Windows); mingw
> doesn't (cygwin does, but I think you weren't proposing that Python be
> built for cygwin - you can easily get cygwin Python anyway). Instead,
> mingw relies on users having a CRT available to
> them - and this will be a Microsoft one. So even if gcc was used, we
> would have versioning issues with Microsoft CRTs, plus we would have to
> rely on target systems including the right CRT, as we couldn't include
> it in the distribution.
>
> HTH,
> Martin


I see. Thanks very much to both of you for the info, much appreciated.