MSVC2013

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 2:55 AM,  <polyvertex at gmail.com> wrote:
> Out of curiosity, is there any plan to use a more recent version of Visual Studio (i.e.: 2013) to compile the official Python3 distribution for Windows?
> Is it in discussion? Maybe waiting for the 2015 version?
>
> I'm working on a C++ software that embeds Python3, currently compiled with MSVC2010 and would like to upgrade to MSVC2013, but it appears that, while being feasible, Python3 won't compile out of the box with that configuration. I would like to avoid that hassle if possible...

There's something in the works with the very newest VS that will
guarantee forward compatibility, which will be awesome. If that
compiler is stable in time for the Python 3.5 release, then it will be
used... but you'll be able to use any future version of VS to build
extensions with, and they'll "just work". I don't know the full
details, as it's still all in alpha at the moment, but yes, there are
definitely plans to compile the newer Python 3.x versions on the newer
compiler. Steve Dower of Microsoft is working closely with the
python-dev group to make sure that this works.

As a general rule, the official Windows builds of CPython are made
with the latest stable VS as of their initial release. Unfortunately,
that means that Python 2.7 is built using the compiler that was
current when 2.7.0 came out, which is no longer supported; there have
been some discussions about what to do about that. But for CPython
3.x, the compilers have all been supported for at least as long as the
Python versions, so it's safe. You just have to wait until (closer to)
the actual release to see which version to use.

ChrisA