Hi everyone, which compiler will Python 2.5 on Windows (Intel) be built with? I notice that Python 2.4 apparently has been built with the VS2003 toolkit compiler, and I read a post from Scott David Daniels [1] where he said that probably the VS2003 toolkit will be used for Python 2.5 again. However, even before the release of Python 2.5, I cannot seem to find many retailers around here that still carry Visual Studio 2003, and some were a bit surprised about my request since Visual Studio 2005 has been available for some months now. Even more importantly, there does not seem to be an official way to still get the 2003 toolkit from Microsoft. The site where it used to be available [2] now redirects you to the 2005 toolkit. The 2003 toolkit also seems to have disappeared from the browseable downloads on the Microsoft page. Searching for VCToolkitSetup.exe on the net, I found a few pages that still appear to carry the file, but most are down or just redirect to a broken link on the Microsoft site. That means that if Python 2.5 will be based on the 2003 toolkit compiler, it will be increasingly difficult to get a compiler for extensions.
Since we have some Python extensions here that use MFC internally (MFC is only available in the retail version of Visual Studio .NET), we need to know in which compiler we have to invest to keep our extensions compatible with Python 2.5. Furthermore, since we also have legacy C++ applications that link to the same libraries that are also used in the Python extensions, we would be disappointed when we now had to switch to Visual Studio 2003 just to be compatible with Python 2.5, loosing official support from Microsoft in near future, and having to use an outdated compiler throughout the lifetime of Python 2.5. Thanks in advance for your comments! Markus Meyer [1] Google Groups: Python 2.5 Schedule (18 messages) http://groups.google.ca/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/2f8be89236999a37/f6f95174484c24cc?hl=en [2] Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
