Ralf Gommers added the comment:

A few comments from the perspective of what's needed for the scientific Python 
stack:

1. Of the three options mentioned in msg243605, it's definitely (3) that is of 
interest. We want to build extensions with MinGW-w64 that work with the 
standard MSVC Python builds. We've done this with mingw32 for a very long time 
(which works fine); not being able to do this for 64-bit extensions is the main 
reason why there are no official 64-bit Windows installers for Numpy, Scipy, 
etc.

2. There is work ongoing on a mingw-w64 toolchain that would work for the 
scientific Python stack: 
https://github.com/numpy/numpy/wiki/Mingw-static-toolchain. It actually works 
pretty well today, what needs to be sorted out is ensuring long-term 
maintainability. More details about what it's based on are provided in 
https://github.com/numpy/numpy/wiki/Mingw-w64-faq - I think it's consistent 
with what Ruben van Boxem recommends. Carl Kleffner, who has done a lot of the 
heavy lifting on this toolchain, is working with upstream mingw-w64 and with 
WinPython to ensure not creating yet another incompatible flavor mingw.

3. It's good to realize why making mingw-w64 work is especially important for 
the scientific Python stack: there's a lot of Fortran code in packages like 
Scipy, for which there is no free compiler that works with MSVC. So one could 
use MSVC + ifort + Intel MKL (which is what Enthought Canopy and Continuum 
Anaconda do), but that's quite expensive and therefore not a good solution for 
the many of contributors to the core scientific Python stack nor okay from the 
point of view of needing to provide official binaries that can be redistributed.

Paul's comments on picking a single mingw-w64 version, and that version not 
being a download from someone's personal homepage, make a lot of sense to me. 
We (Carl & several core numpy/scipy/scikit-learn devs) happened to have planned 
a call on this topic soon in order to move towards a long-term sustainable 
plan. I wouldn't expect everything to be sorted out in a couple of weeks (it's 
indeed a hard goal), but knowing that Paul is willing to review and merge 
patches definitely helps.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue4709>
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