Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: > i'd say "great" - but given a choice of "impressive profile guided > optimisation plus a proprietary compiler, proprietary operating system > _and_ being forced to purchase a system _capable_ of running said > proprietary compiler, said proprietary operating system, _and_ giving > up free software principles _and_ having to go through patch-pain, > install-pain _and_ being forced to use a GUI-based IDE for > compilation" or "free software tools and downloads the use of which > means i am beholden to NOONE", it's a simple choice for me to make - > maybe not for other people. It only becomes a problem when someone wants to both support Windows users of their extension modules with pre-built binaries, but *also* doesn't want to set up the appropriate environment for building such binaries (currently a minimum bar of Visual Studio Express on a Windows VM instance). The most common reaction I've seen to this problem from package developers is "I don't run Windows, so if users want pre-built binaries, someone with a Windows environment is going to have to volunteer to provide them". And that seems like a perfectly reasonable way to handle the situation to me. On POSIX systems, GCC does a great job, on Windows, MSVC is better (from a performance point of view). The closed source vs open source, free vs non-free philosophical arguments don't really play a significant part in the decision. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@xxxxxxxxx | Brisbane, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------
