The goal of mingwpy project is to provide a free toolchain for building Python extensions for Windows OS, and make sure that those extensions are compatible with CPython compiled with native Visual Studio.

mingwpy toolchain contains customized gcc, g++ and gfortran compilers of the GNU toolchain based on the Mingw-w64 and the mingw-builds projects.

• Documentation: https://mingwpy.github.io/
• Discussions: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mingwpy

Installing built mingwpy toolchain with pip

Experimental builds of mingwpy for Python 2.7 and 3.4 are available for testing purposes:

pip install -i https://pypi.anaconda.org/carlkl/simple mingwpy

Note: Python 3.5 is not supported yet.

Building mingwpy yourself

Prerequisites: Install MSYS2 for mingw-builds

Install https://msys2.github.io/ "Unix environment" for Windows to be able to run mingw-builds scripts.

NEVER use an installation path for msys2 containing SPACES or other special characters!

Use pacman from MSYS2 to install mingw-builds dependencies:

pacman -Sy --noconfirm git svn zip tar autoconf make libtool automake p7zip \
    patch bison gettext-devel wget sshpass texinfo

Now make sure the mingw-w64 toolchain is NOT installed by pacman, because we are going to build our own:

$ gcc -v
bash: gcc: command not found

Clone customized mingw-builds scripts:

git clone -b mingwpy-dev https://github.com/mingwpy/mingw-builds.git
cd mingw-builds

The mingw-builds build scripts in turn download the rest of prerequisites for building GCC compiler.

Build 64-bit toolchain

To download only (to build later):

./build --mode=gcc-5.3.0 --static-gcc --arch=x86_64 --march-x64='x86-64' \
    --mtune-x64='generic' --rev=201603 --rt-version=trunk --threads=win32 \
    --exceptions=seh --enable-languages=c,c++,fortran \
    --buildroot=/tmp/x86_64 --fetch-only

To download and build all at once:

./build --mode=gcc-5.3.0 --static-gcc --arch=x86_64 --march-x64='x86-64' \
    --mtune-x64='generic' --rev=201603 --rt-version=trunk --threads=win32 \
    --exceptions=seh --enable-languages=c,c++,fortran \
    --buildroot=/tmp/x86_64 --bootstrap --no-multilib --bin-compress --jobs=4

Build 32-bit toolchain

To download only (to build later):

./build --mode=gcc-5.3.0 --static-gcc --arch=i686 --march-x32='pentium4' \
    --mtune-x32='generic' --buildroot=/tmp/i686 --rev=201603 --rt-version=trunk \
    --threads=win32 --exceptions=sjlj --enable-languages=c,c++,fortran --fetch-only

To download and build all at once:

./build --mode=gcc-5.3.0 --static-gcc --arch=i686 --march-x32='pentium4' \
    --mtune-x32='generic' --buildroot=/tmp/i686 --rev=201603 --rt-version=trunk \
    --threads=win32 --exceptions=sjlj --enable-languages=c,c++,fortran --bootstrap \
    --no-multilib --bin-compress --jobs=4

The build process can be accelerated with the flag--jobs=N. The number N given should be the number of cores availabe for the build process.

The toolchains are fully portable and can be unpacked without admin rights or other installation hussles. As some build systems doesn't like paths with spaces or other special characters it is recommended to avoid such paths. To use the toolchain it is necessary to find the executables in the bin folder. This can be achieved with extending the PATH environment variable

Configuring the toolchain for a specific version of CPython

The toolchain needs to know which version of Visual Studio to target. Each Python is compiled with different VS version, so you need to tune the toolchain by copying appropriate spec files, see readme_specs.md.