[Python-Dev] Re: No-cost optimizing VC 7.1 (original) (raw)

Paul Moore pf_moore at yahoo.co.uk
Sun Apr 18 12:13:56 EDT 2004

"Tim Peters" <tim.one at comcast.net> writes:

Thanks to David Abrahams for passing on this info: a free optimizing cmdline VC 7.1 has been released by MS:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/ The 32MB download appears to contain much of the meat of Visual Studio .NET 2003 Professional, including the compiler, linker, static-link libraries for the C, C++ & STL runtimes, and the .NET Common Language Runtime.

Sadly, a test seems to show that the /MD option links with msvcrt.dll, and not with msvcr71.dll. So this still isn't of immediate use in building Python extensions which will run against a standard Python binary distribution.

This would tie in with the information given on the MS website: "C Runtime Library and the C++ Standard Library, including the Standard Template Library. These are the same static-link libraries included with Visual Studio."

Note this bit........................^^^^^^^^^^^

I just checked my hard disk (I have MSVC6SP6, a recent platform SDK, .NET framework and SDK, and the VC Toolkit 2003 installed) and I can't find any occurrences of msvcr71.lib, implying that none of these tools offers the possibility of creating code which links against msvcr71.dll...

Another oddity - apparently a cast from float to long generates a call to an internal function _ftol2, where it called _ftol in earlier versions. So code that links with /MD fails to link if it contains such a cast (as the compiler generates code to call support functions which are not in the CRT DLL that is being used...)

Don't get me wrong - it's great that MS have done this, it's just not the end of the story.

Paul.

This signature intentionally left blank

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list