One reason for not switching to VC 8, which hasn't yet been explicitly mentioned here, is that MinGW does not yet easily support linking to the msvcr80 runtime library. Some C extension modules, for instance those in SciPy, are primarily developed under Linux with GCC and hence are most easily built on Windows with MinGW. If the official Python distribution was linked to msvcr80.dll, many extension modules probably could not be built "out of the box" on Windows (with MinGW) anymore.
The 64bit compiler in VS2005 is pretty handy, though. Regards, Stephan _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com