[Python-Dev] [C++-sig] GCC version compatibility (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Tue Jul 12 10:19:20 CEST 2005

Christoph Ludwig wrote:

If I understood Dave Abraham's reply somewhere above in this thread correctly then you can build different C++ extension modules with different C++ compilers on ELF/Linux. (I don't have the time right now to actually try it, sorry.) There is no need to fix the C++ compiler as soon as python is built.

There is, somewhat: how do you know the name of the C++ compiler?

If distutils builds C++ extensions with the C compiler then I consider this a bug in distutils because it is unlikely to work. (Unless the compiler can figure out from the source file suffixes in the compilation step and some info in the object files in the linking step that it is supposed to act like a C++ compiler. None of the compilers I am familiar with does the latter.) distutils should rather look for a C++ compiler in the PATH or explicitly ask the user to specify the command that calls the C++ compiler.

How should it do that? The logic is quite involved, and currently, distutils relies on configure to figure it out. If you think this should be changed, please contribute a patch.

(distutils does not behave correctly when building C++ extensions anyway. It calls the C compiler to compile the C++ source files and passes options that gcc accepts only in C mode. The compiler version I am using is docile and only issues warnings. But these warnings are unnecessary and and I would not blame gcc if the next compiler release refused to compile C++ sources if the command line contains C specific options. But the distutils mailing list is a better place to bring this eventually up, I guess.)

The best way to "bring this up" is to contribute a patch. "Bringing it up" in the sense of sending an email message to some mailing list likely has no effect whatsoever.

Regards, Martin

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list