[SciPy-Dev] win32 binaries and scipy 0.17.0 release

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 12:48 PM, Tony Kelman <tony at kelman.net> wrote:
> Matthew Brett <matthew.brett <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>> The problem we're trying to solve, is making a toolchain that will
>> allow any project to build their own Windows .whl installers without
>> having to worry about how other projects were built.
>
> You are making an implicit assumption though that all other projects
> were built for compatibility with the python.org builds of CPython,
> and that all users will absolutely want to do this. For people who
> want to embed Python, e.g. in GDB, Blender, IJulia, etc this isn't
> a requirement that adds much value.

It's also true though that the userbase who cares about running numpy
inside a non-standard embedded python is much, much smaller than the
userbase trying to run numpy on standard python. We certainly care
about all users, but we also have to prioritize, and have extremely
limited resources. :-/

It's possible that over the next few years enough patches will
materialize and things will settle down enough to allow the programs
mentioned above to switch to a MSVC2015-compatible runtime+ABI, which
would at least allow them to embed a standard py35. Fingers crossed.

Alternatively the mingw-w64 folks have a plan for how to teach their
compiler to generate .dll's that are "runtime agile", i.e. will adapt
themselves at dll-load-time to whichever runtime is in use by the host
process, and that would solve this problem in general. But this would
take more resources than we can scrounge out of the couch cushions (on
the order of ~$100k instead of ~$10k), and while this would be pocket
change for Microsoft, it turns out that even after extensive
discussion, "the new open-source friendly Microsoft" is not currently
interested in spending money to solve the endless pain their
platform's brokenness causes for open source devs. So we do what we
can.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org