> so why shouldn’t the one with the most users?

Because it makes compilation difficult, and cross-compilatin completely 
impossible?  Why is it difficult: a package maintainer needs to (1) buy MS 
Windows (2) create a special workflow for compiling on a different machine.  
This is both costly and inconsistent with free-as-in-freedom...  It makes 
cross-compilation impossible because libraries produced by any tool that can 
run on all target platforms are incompatible with Python binaries on MS Windows.

Again, many languages (i.e. projects similar in size an purpose to CPython) 
took a different approach: they use GNU compilers to be able to compile 
cross-platform.  This is true for Ruby and Go at least.  I would need to 
investigate further, but I think these two examples should be enough.

> I’m likely biased because I work there and I’m the main intermediary with 
> python-dev, but these days Microsoft is one of the strongest supporters of 
> CPython. We employ the most core developers of any private company and we all 
> are allowed work time to contribute, we provide full access to our 
> development tools and platforms to all core developers and some prominent 
> projects, we’ve made fixes, enhancements and releases or core products such 
> as the CRT, MSVC, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and Azure SPECIFICALLY 
> to support CPython development and users. As far as I know, ALL the Windows 
> buildbots are running on Azure subscriptions that Microsoft provides (though 
> managed by some awesome volunteers). You’ll see us at PyCon US under the 
> biggest banner and we’ll have a booth filled with engineers and not 
> recruiters. Crash reports from thousands of opted-in users come into our 
> systems and have directly lead to both CPython and Windows bug fixes.

Oh, so this is the real reason... well, corporate interests are hard to argue 
against.  But, this is an interesting statistic nevertheless.  Thanks for 
letting me know.

Best.

Oleg
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