[Python-Dev] mingw support? (original) (raw)

Sturla Molden sturla at molden.no
Mon Aug 9 20:47:23 CEST 2010

Terry Reedy:

MingW has become less attractive in recent years by the difficulty in downloading and installing a current version and finding out how to do so. Some projects have moved on to the TDM packaging of MingW.

http://tdm-gcc.tdragon.net/

MinGW has become a mess. Equation.com used to have a decent installer, but at some point they started to ship mingw builds with a Trojan. TDM looks OK for now.

Building 32-bit Python extension works with MinGW. 64-bit extensions are not possible due to lacking import libraries (no libmsvcr90.a and libpython26.a for amd64). It is not possible to build Python with mingw, only extensions.

I think it is possible to build Python with Microsoft's SDK compiler, as it has nmake. The latest is Windows 7 SDK for .NET 4, but we need the version for .NET 3.5 to maintain CRT compatibility with current Python releases.

Python's distutils do not work with the SDK compiler, only Visual Studio. Building Python extensions with the SDK compiler is not as easy as it could (or should) be.

One advantage of mingw for scientific programmers (which a frequent users of Python) is the gfortran compiler. Although it is not as capable as Absoft or Intel Fortran, it is still decent and can be used with f2py. This makes the lack of 64-bit support for Python extensions with mingw particularly annoying. Microsoft's SDK does not have a Fortran compiler, and commercial versions are very expensive (though I prefer to pay for Absoft anyway).

I do not wish for a complete build process for mingw. But support for 64-bit exensions with mingw and distutils support for Microsoft's SDK compiler would be nice.

Sturla

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