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

[Steve Dower]

And unfortunately, a lot of that work may need to be redone for 3.5 and VC14... Sorry about that, but once the other compilers have caught up with the new CRT interface then it will (should) all be better in the long run.

Cheers,
Steve

Top-posted from my Windows Phone
________________________________
From: Nathaniel Smith<mailto:njs at pobox.com>
Sent: ‎3/‎18/‎2015 10:31
To: anatoly techtonik<mailto:techtonik at gmail.com>
Cc: python-ideas at python.org<mailto:python-ideas at python.org>
Subject: Re: [Python-ideas] Rewriting the build system (part 2)


On Mar 18, 2015 8:14 AM, "anatoly techtonik" <techtonik at gmail.com<mailto:techtonik at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 7:31 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov<mailto:chris.barker at noaa.gov>> wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 6:24 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com<mailto: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<http://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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