[Python-ideas] Rewriting the build system (part 2)

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mar 18, 2015 8:14 AM, "anatoly techtonik" <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 7:31 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov>
wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 6:24 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> "Autotools has reached the Chandrasekhar mass limit of software and
> >> become a black hole of suck that consumes endless hours of bright
> >> peoples’ time without any good result. It is well past time for it to
> >> die." (c) "Autotools must die", ESR. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1877
> >>
> >> I couldn't sum up this better. It looks even worse from Windows
machine.
> >
> > Is it even used for building Python on Windows (for the "normal"
python.org
> > builds)?
>
> There was some success with MinGW toolchain, but I am not tracking if it
was
> integrated into official source. The FUD was that compiled extensions are
not
> compatible between MSVC builds and MinGW builds, but I could not confirm
> that. If I understand correctly, the incompatibility is only for C++
programs,
> because of strange SEH strategy and proprietary name mangling.

This isn't FUD, alas. mingw in almost all of its variants uses effectively
a different "libc" than MSVC, so code compiled with two compilers can't
even agree on the meaning of file numbers. It is mostly possible to set up
a mingw-w64 build that produces MSVC-compatible extensions, but it requires
using a configuration that's undocumented and untested upstream (I.e. you
will run into mingw bugs). NumPy *may* switch to this at some point --
we've been working on it for like a year now -- but it's extremely
non-trivial.

-n
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