[ANN] GCC 4.1.2 installer for Python distutils compilation

[Giovanni Bajo]

Hello,

This page:
http://www.develer.com/oss/GccWinBinaries

contains a friendly Windows installer for GCC 4.1.2 (MinGW binary version),
with full support for integrating it with Python installations so that it is
used by distutils to compile Python extensions.


Direct download link:
http://www.develer.com/~rasky/gcc-4.1.2-mingw-setup.exe


Who needs this package?

* People who wants to use FLOSS tools to develop Python extensions.
* People who wants to use the recent GCC 4.1.2 to develop Python extensions,
given that it easily outperforms the 4-years-old Visual Studio .NET 2003.


What's special about this?

* mingw.org still has GCC 3.4.2, so go figure. Also, you need to compose
other packages together. This is a single installer with everything inside.
* By default, MinGW GCC links with MSVCRT.DLL, and not MSVCR71.DLL (used by
Python 2.4 and 2.5). Fixing this is pretty complicate, and there's much
confusion (Google turns up red herrings). This package handles everything for
you, and it just works.

 

[David Rushby]

This page:
http://www.develer.com/oss/GccWinBinaries

contains a friendly Windows installer for GCC 4.1.2 (MinGW binary version),
with full support for integrating it with Python installations so that it is
used by distutils to compile Python extensions.

Sweet!

Even though I have access to MSVC 7.1, so I don't really need MinGW
myself, it can be unnecessarily difficult to get Windows-using
contributors started on a project that involves C extensions. Your
contribution should improve the situation greatly.

Thanks a lot.

 

[Giovanni Bajo]

Even though I have access to MSVC 7.1, so I don't really need MinGW
myself, [...]

But remember that GCC 4.1.2 is almost 4 years newer than MSVC 7.1, and I found
it to produce more optimized code (especially for C++). Since it's a free
alternative, it might be worth to give it a go

 

[David Rushby]

Even though I have access to MSVC 7.1, so I don't really need MinGW
myself, [...]

But remember that GCC 4.1.2 is almost 4 years newer than MSVC 7.1, and
I found it to produce more optimized code (especially for C++). Since it's
a free alternative, it might be worth to give it a go

I just wrote a high-performance Windows-1251 codec in C (an optimized
alternative to Python's including 'cp1251' codec).

On Windows 2000 / Prescott PIV, GCC 4.1.2 does indeed produce code
that is 30% faster than MSVC (this is with aggressive optimization
switch tinkering on both compilers). This is for fairly simple, non-
floating-point C code.