On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 4:19 AM, Oleg Sivokon <ol...@traiana.com> wrote:
> > > 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. > They should be enough for *what*, though? You can tell people what everyone else is doing, but the difference between that and what we have is someone's time and effort. > 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. I think that's a mischaracterization of the situation. The MS toolchain was chosen some time long before I (or Steve) got involved, and when I upgraded us from VS2008 to VS2010 for 3.3 ~6 years ago I had several messages similar to this thread. As much as Steve is unlikely to do the work to initiate and maintain support of these other tools—whether due to his employer's interests or his own—I too was unlikely to do work like this thread is asking. In fact, the chances I would have done it were zero because I was sitting on my couch upgrading our Visual Studio versions because it let me do better stuff at my day job, though I was always open to review patches that supported alternatives without major disruption. However, they never came. I suspect the same could be said of Martin and anyone else working in this area prior to that, because nothing has really changed. Like the previous times this sort of question has come up—and really, for any question on this list—it ultimately turns into a matter of how much the solution is wanted and how much effort people are willing to give to make it happen. Historically, the former has had small amounts, and the latter has had much smaller amounts. Without a change there I don't think one will materialize in a released version of Python. Brian
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