On 10 October 2014 10:50, Victor Stinner <victor.stin...@gmail.com> wrote: > Is MinGW fully compatible with MSVS ABI? I read that it reuses the > MSVCRT, but I don't know if it's enough. I guess that a full ABI > compatibility means more than just using the C library, calling > convention and much more.
MinGW can be made to build ABI-compatible extensions. Whether this will continue with MSVC 15 I don't know, as it requires a change to add an interface library for the relevant msvcrXX runtime. And the MinGW community is somewhat fragmented these days, with the core project not supporting 64-bit and various external projects doing so. Having said all this, it *is* possible with some effort to use MinGW to build Python extensions. As noted, the numpy developers have done a lot of work on this as some of the libraries they need must be built with mingw. And the state of distutils support for mingw is very sad, as well, IIRC (last time I looked there were a number of open bugs, and very little movement on them). Rather than put effort into more build options for CPython, I think it would be much more beneficial to the Windows community if effort was put into: 1. Improving support for compiling *extensions* with mingw and its 64-bit cousins, in a way that is compatible with a standard MSVC-built Python. This would involve sorting through and applying some of the distutils changes, as well as working with the mingw projects to ensure they will offer support for the MSVC15 runtime ina timely manner. 2. Looking at ways to support cross-compiling Windows extensions from Linux using mingw. I've no idea how practical this would be, but if Linux developers could provide Windows builds without having to maintain a Windows environment, that would be great. As I say, I have no personal interest here, as I use MSVC, but I know the above two options are commonly asked for. Paul _______________________________________________ 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