Building wheels with GCC in Windows

[Clayblockunova]

currently, MSVC is the only solution in for wheels building in Windows. adding GCC as alternative option would be useful since GCC is much smaller than Visual Studio and can be installed in Windows with tools like MSYS2.

[kdschlosser]

MSVC is not all that large if you install the build tools and not Visual Studio.

https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vs_BuildTools.exe

[Clayblockunova]

MSVC is not all that large if you install the build tools and not Visual Studio.

https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vs_BuildTools.exe

how is that compared to GCC+MSYS2?

[kdschlosser]

size wise? not sure. Considering MSYS2 is a virtual machine I would hazard a guess that they are possibly pretty close in size. There are portions of the build tools that need to be installed anyhow in order to compile.

I just ran the installer and it is 139mb in size for just the base installation. once you add in UCRT, v14.4 MFC, v14.4 ATL and the Windows 11 SDK the size ends up as 1.37gb which is a whole lot smaller than the 10gb to 20gb a full tilt Visual Studio installation takes up. I am pretty sure that even when using MSYS2 you will still need to have the MFC, ATL, UCRT and the Windows SDK available. If that is the case then those would not factor as a size comparison for either system because it is needed either way. The size of the installation minus those bits is 128mb and I would be pretty surprised if the installation size of MSYS2 is less than that considering there usually a lot of other things needed like makefile, cmake, etc...

I wanted to point out that there is an option to be able to get the tools needed in order to compile using MSVC without having to eat up 20gb of drive space.

[kdschlosser]

the other animal is mingw, it's a dead project. there hasn't been an update to it in 4 years. no sense in using software from a dead project because it's going to end up having to be swapped out in 2-3 years more than likely.

their webiste link is also dead..

http://osdn.net/projects/mingw

[Clayblockunova]

the other animal is mingw, it's a dead project. there hasn't been an update to it in 4 years. no sense in using software from a dead project because it's going to end up having to be swapped out in 2-3 years more than likely.

their webiste link is also dead..

http://osdn.net/projects/mingw

seems there is an active fork at https://www.mingw-w64.org/.

[Clayblockunova]

maybe it's just a preference stuff?