What's up with Activestate Python?

[Thomas Jollans]

On 14/02/2019 19:10, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2019-02-14, Liste guru <digitalfantasy.it86559 at digitalfantasy.it> wrote:
>> Il 14/02/2019 00:06, Grant Edwards ha scritto:
>>> For many, many years I've always installed ActiveState's ActivePython
>>> Community edition when forced to use Windows.  It has always included
>>> ...
>>> I guess it's time to switch to Anaconda or ???
>>
>> I've also used the ActiveState python, expecially for the 2.7.x
>> series, mainly for the oflline docs and the pywin32 libraries.
>>
>> Now the situation is better and with pip is really easy to have an 
>> updated python with a lot of libs so there is less need for the 
>> ActiveState distribution.
> 
> How does that work for libraries that require a C compiler?  Does pip
> know how to download and install any required C/C++ toolchains?
> 

Most extension modules on PyPI are distributed with binary wheels these
days, so there's no need for a C compiler. This is certainly the case
for the usual suspects (numpy etc). You probably won't have any trouble
using the python.org version. In a pinch, the Microsoft compiler isn't
hard to install (and free to download).

Anaconda also has its moments, and has some packages that PyPI doesn't
(for my use case, this is primarily PyQt5).

I don't think I've used ActiveState since the Python 2.3 days, so I
can't speak for that.