[dist-epoch]

This was mostly because most scientific packages didn't provide Windows binary builds for many years.

Today you can just "pip install scipy" on Windows at it will just work.

[wruza]

Oh right, recently I started learning classic ML and “just” tried to install tensorflow, which, itself or through one of dependencies, stopped providing windows binaries since x.y.z and so my python has to be downgraded to 3.a and then other dependencies stop installing. Eventually I managed to find a proper version intersection for everything together with some shady repo, but it felt like one more requirement and I’ll get overconstrained.

[disgruntledphd2]

Tensorflow is the worst. Basically every time my python env was borked (with multiple incompatible versions of Numpy) it was down to tensorflow.

[coredog64]

You said it. I was working with an official Google library that used TF and it didn’t work at all with 3.12. I spent a day building the wheels for 3.12 only to find there was a bug with dataclasses. :|

I can’t recall the library, but there was another major project that just deprecated TF because it was the cause of so many build problems.