py2exe and 64/32 bit windows

[Grant Edwards]

Disclaimer: I'm a Unix guy and have been since the days of V7 on a
PDP-11 -- I rarely use MS Windows.

While I don't normally use Windows, I do occasionally have Python
applications (written under Linux) which I'd like to distribute to
Windows users. I've always used py2exe and Inno Setup to that, and
it's always worked OK (after a fair bit of stumbling around).

My "Windows partition" currently has a 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate
installation.

I'm told that the executable I generate on that machine won't run on
Win7 32-bit installations. I'm not surprised by that, but I'd like to
provide 32-bit operability -- and I'm not sure how one does that.

* If I built an executable on a 32-bit windows system using py2exe,
would it be usable on a 64-bit install?

* Is there such a thing as a "fat" Windows binary that will run on
both 32 and 64 bit systems?

* Or do you build separate 32 and 64 bit binaries and rely on the
installer to pick the right files? [If Inno Setup can't do that, I
can probably get somebody else to build the installer using
something that can.]

Or do I just wait until MS includs Python/tkinger/wxPython as part of
every Windows install?

--
Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! Are we live or on
at tape?
gmail.com


P.S. Don't tell anybody I can actually write programs that will run
under MS Windows -- it's a secret.

 

[Grant Edwards]

Yes, 64-bit Windows systems will run 32-bit executables.

OK, that's good to know.

* Is there such a thing as a "fat" Windows binary that will run on
both 32 and 64 bit systems?

With .NET applications you can choose an AnyCPU build target that
will dynamically select 32-bit or 64-bit at runtime based on the host
OS, but there is no such feature for native applications like
CPython.

* Or do you build separate 32 and 64 bit binaries and rely on the
installer to pick the right files? [If Inno Setup can't do that, I
can probably get somebody else to build the installer using
something that can.]

You could do that. The easiest thing to do though is just to make
sure that your 64-bit Windows installation is using a 32-bit Python
installation. py2exe doesn't really build anything; it just bundles
your source files up with the Python interpreter, so as long as that
interpreter is 32-bit the generated exes should be able to run on
either platform.

Cool, I'll try that.

Are there any drawbacks to running a 32-bit Python install on a 64-bit
machine?

Can you have both 32 and 64 bit Python installed at the same time?

 

[Ian Kelly]

Are there any drawbacks to running a 32-bit Python install on a 64-bit
machine?

Apart from still being limited to a 2-GB address space, nothing that
I'm aware of.

Can you have both 32 and 64 bit Python installed at the same time?

Absolutely.

 

[Benjamin Kaplan]

Yes, 64-bit Windows systems will run 32-bit executables.

OK, that's good to know.

* Is there such a thing as a "fat" Windows binary that will run on
both 32 and 64 bit systems?

With .NET applications you can choose an AnyCPU build target that
will dynamically select 32-bit or 64-bit at runtime based on the host
OS, but there is no such feature for native applications like
CPython.

* Or do you build separate 32 and 64 bit binaries and rely on the
installer to pick the right files? [If Inno Setup can't do that, I
can probably get somebody else to build the installer using
something that can.]

You could do that. The easiest thing to do though is just to make
sure that your 64-bit Windows installation is using a 32-bit Python
installation. py2exe doesn't really build anything; it just bundles
your source files up with the Python interpreter, so as long as that
interpreter is 32-bit the generated exes should be able to run on
either platform.

Cool, I'll try that.

Are there any drawbacks to running a 32-bit Python install on a 64-bit
machine?

Can you have both 32 and 64 bit Python installed at the same time?

--
Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! Is it clean in other
at dimensions?
gmail.com
--

There aren't any drawbacks besides the usual 32-bit limitations (the memory
limit and you can't load 64-bit libs from a 32-bit exe). You can run both
32-bit and 64-bit python side by side.