"You might want to interact with Steve Dower off-list" FWIW, I'm happy to talk specifics off list, and have already been involved in a number of discussions with the numpy and Scipy guys wrt figuring out specific technical challenges or clarifying non obvious parts of dealing with Windows. (As far as coding goes, practically all my spare time is taken up already, which is why I haven't contributed directly to those projects, much as I'd like to.)
Cheers, Steve Top-posted from my Windows Phone ________________________________ From: Stephen J. Turnbull<mailto:step...@xemacs.org> Sent: 10/28/2014 20:59 To: Tony Kelman<mailto:kel...@berkeley.edu> Cc: python-dev@python.org<mailto:python-dev@python.org> Subject: Re: [Python-Dev] Status of C compilers for Python on Windows Tony Kelman writes: > No, just hearing the words come out of my mouth they sound a little > nuts. Maybe not, there are after all half a dozen or more > incompatible alternate Python implementations floating around. I > think most of them started as from-scratch rewrites rather than > source forks, but maybe that's irrelevant. Well, they have different names and they clearly are not intended to be ABI compatible, so noone expects that. OTOH, there clearly is an expectation among many (and not just in the Windows world, cf. all of the distros that provide whole stacks of everything for each version of Python) that downloaded packages will just work without incompatibility. > > Well, for starters, most of python-dev would rather avoid any contact > > whatsoever with Windows. I think part of the problem is that Windows > > developers *of* Python are *very* rare (fingers of one hand rare). > > In my opinion the MSVC toolchain makes that problem worse, as it's far > harder for unix developers to have any familiarity with how things > work. I've used Cygwin, I've used MinGW, and I've used VC. Sure, the former two are GCC-based so I have a lot of muscle memory for command-line switches. But that's not very important; the pain of using Windows is what drives me away from all of them. > But you do have involvement and core developers from Microsoft > which is obviously incredibly important. Maybe even mandatory for > Python on Windows to be viable in your eyes. No, I don't think that's true. What I think *is* true is that most developers on Windows do have access to Microsoft tools, so we do need to provide compatibility with them. As you say, the VC toolchain is not all things to all men, but what's visible to python-dev makes it more important than Cygwin or MinGW. See Paul Moore's post about communications between the scientific Python community and python-dev for what I mean by "visible". > > It should be evident by now that our belief is that the large > > majority of Windows users is well-served by the current model > > This is not the case at all in the scientific community. NumPy and > SciPy put in a lot of extra work to come up with something that is > compatible with the MSVC build of CPython because they have to, not > because they're "happy to" jump through the necessary hoops. Agreed. This is well-known to python-dev, and AFAICS it *is* a concern for us. However, as Paul points out, a bridge needs to be built. Your posts have been a contribution to building that bridge, for sure, but more work on the bridge is needed. > Do python-dev and numpy-discussion not talk to one another? Exactly the issue here. To resolve this, we need to talk more. Unfortunately, I'm not one to help build the bridge as I haven't developed on Windows at all since about 2003. > I'm going to move the "extensions with MinGW-w64" part of this > conversation over to numpy-discussion, As far as I can tell, that's a good idea right now. They have the need, they have the expertise, both of which are somewhat lacking here. > Okay. I'll table the discussion with python-dev for now then. I hope you'll be able to come pick it back up at some point. You might want to interact with Steve Dower off-list, as he's spearheading the effort to move the official builds to the "stable ABI" version of MSVC. Once that's in place, the MinGW guys will have a stationary target which is up to date to shoot at. _______________________________________________ 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/steve.dower%40microsoft.com
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