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by rogerbinns 5116 days ago
Are they going to include 64bit support? The earlier versions of Visual Studio Express didn't which was a right royal pain for me. I produce a Python library and since Windows users don't have compilers have binary downloads available. To get 64 bit command line compiles I had to do an unholy wedging of VSE and the platform dev kit. (I'd much rather the Python developers used free software instead of forcing this stuff onto the rest of us.)

If anyone is curious you can see the downloads and popularity at http://code.google.com/p/apsw/downloads/list

1 comments

I think that if you install the Windows 7.1 SDK, you should be able to choose Platform SDK and target it, rather than the built in compilers.

WSDK7.1 is VS2010, but at least latest IDE would be used.

If only it was so easy. The existing Python versions need VS2008 so I have to use Platform SDK 7.0 (not 7.1). Then it and VS2008 won't play nice with paths, so in the end I just hardcoded them in my setup script. http://code.google.com/p/apsw/wiki/Win7build

The next Python release is using VS2012 so I'll have to have it, whatever it takes to get it and 64 bit binaries, plus VS2008 and PSDK 7.0 all installed at the same time.

The ultimate cause of all this is Microsoft bundling the C library with the compiler, and not being able to have more than one version of the C library in a process which forces the executable and all dlls to be compiled with the same compiler version.

Yup. For that reason I stick with the WDK 7.1 (and target MSVCRT.DLL by linking with msvcrt_win2000.obj, and this works on XP). Yes this would not work for Python built with VS2008, but it would not require me to carry MSVCRxx.DLLs everywhere.