dw+python-...@hmmz.org wrote: > Speaking as a third party who aims to provide binary distributions for recent > Python releases on Windows, every new compiler introduces a licensing and > configuration headache. So I guess the questions are: > > * Does the ABI stability address some historical real world problem with > Python binary builds? (I guess possibly)
Yes. It's very hard to explain to users that even though they've gone out and paid for Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate, they don't really have a C compiler that works with Python. This stability will eventually get us to a place where it doesn't matter what version of the compiler you have, though for a while people will obviously need the latest. (Another thing I'm working on is making sure that it's really easy to get the latest... lots of pieces to this puzzle.) > * Is the existing solution of third parties building under e.g. Mingw as > an option of last resort causing real world issues? It seems to work > for a lot of people, although I personally avoid it. I think it actually tends to solve more issues than it causes :( I want to fix that by making MSVC better for Python, rather than switching away to another toolset. > * Have other compiler vendors indicated they will change their ABI > environment to match VS under this new stability guarantee? If not, > then as yet there is no real world benefit here. I have no idea, but I hope they do (eventually they almost certainly will). I've already mentioned to our team that they should reach out to the other projects and try to help them move it along, though I have no idea if they have the time or contacts to manage that. FWIW, the stability guarantee was only announced this week, so there's a good chance that the gcc/clang/etc. teams aren't even aware of it yet. > * Has Python ever hit a showstopper release issue as a result of a bug > in MSVC? (I guess probably not). Not to my knowledge, and I'm certainly hoping to avoid it by keeping the builds coming regularly. I can't do an official buildbot for it (and probably can't even reuse the infrastructure) since I'm going to work against the latest internal version as much as I can and we get new builds almost daily. More likely, building Python will reveal showstopper issues that actually get fixed (and it has done in the past, though that was never publicised :) ) > * Will VS 14 be golden prior to Python 3.5's release? It would suck to > rely on a beta compiler.. :) I sure hope so. The current planning looks like it will (I'm assuming that Python 3.5 is going to be late next year, but I couldn't find a good reference). If things slip here, I'm going to be surrounded by very stressed people, which is not much fun. So I hope it'll be done! At worst, VS 14 RC (or whatever label it gets) will probably be released under a "go live" licence. If anything is dramatically broken at that point, we'll know and it should be fixed, or we know that it's going to be around for a while regardless and we can make the decision to either stick with VC10 or work around the issues. > Sorry for dunking water on this, but I've recently spent a ton of time > getting a > Microsoft build environment running, and it seems possible a new compiler may > not yet justify more effort if there is little tangible benefit. Not at all. I've spent far more time than I wanted to getting a build environment running for producing the Python 2.7 installers, and I spent just as long getting an environment for default going too. I'm personally a big fan of automating things like this, so you can also expect scripts (probably PowerShell) that will configure as much as possible. Cheers, Steve > David _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
