[Python-Dev] Building Extensions for Python 3.5 on Windows (original) (raw)

Steve Dower steve.dower at python.org
Tue Sep 1 18:15:56 CEST 2015

On 01Sep2015 0747, Oscar Benjamin wrote:

Thanks for the detailed writeup Steve. Do you know how these changes to the python.org Windows binaries would impact on people building extension modules with MinGW?

Currently, no version of MinGW AFAIK will link against the UCRT, so they'll suffer from the same mixed-CRT issues as with any other arrangement. There is some work going towards making mingw-w64 work with UCRT, but I am not following it closely despite occasional contact with the dev(s) working on it.

I think that some extension module authors use MinGW for their Windows binaries because then a single compiler installation can compile for multiple Python versions and link against whichever msvcrtXX.dll is needed. For example in the numpy release notes [1]: "The MinGW compilers used to build the official Numpy binary installers for 32-bit Python on Windows can be found in https://github.com/numpy/numpy-vendor."

Perhaps it would be good to verify that the numpy MinGW build instructions still work?

I'd love it for someone to do that. My MinGW skills are so poor though that all I'd be verifying is whether I messed up or not :). Certainly most of numpy builds fine with MSVC - it's just the optimized Fortran pieces that require either Intel's compiler (to link against MSVC) or a complete switch to gcc.

Cheers, Steve

[1] https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/INSTALL.txt#L118

-- Oscar

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