[Xapian-discuss] compiler on ms

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Jul 06, 2015 at 01:11:11PM +0100, Charlie Hull wrote:
> On 06/07/2015 12:55, Olly Betts wrote:
> >Maintenance was the real problem with the "MSVC makefiles", and I can't
> >see that being all that different just by changing the compiler that
> >you're building a parallel build system for.
> 
> As the erstwhile maintainer of the MSVC makefiles (and my apologies
> for not keeping up) I can wholeheartedly agree: they were a massive
> pain to maintain.
> 
> The reason I originally took the project on was that we needed a
> MSVC-compiled Python binding for Xapian (as this was the only thing
> that would work with the Python for Windows binary release) and you
> couldn't build this with Mingw etc. This may or may not still be the
> case.

With newer Python it's supported directly by distutils.  I think it
would probably have been possible even back then, but required sorting
out various tricky bits of setup to make it work.  There are a number of
pages about it, e.g.:

http://oldwiki.mingw.org/index.php/Python%20extensions

The case which is more of a problem is actually when using the C++ API.

Cheers,
    Olly