What version of Visual Studio and/or MinGW do I need to build extension modules for a given version of Python?

Question

To put this question a different way, what version of Visual C++ was each official build of Python from python.org of Python built with, and what versions of MinGW are compatible with those versions of Visual C++?

Is this information readily available on some web site?

Answer 1

The file PCbuild\readme.txt in the source distribution of each version of Python includes the version of Visual Studio used to make the binaries.

Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.1, and 3.2 were all compiled with VS 2008. Python 3.3 and 3.4 are compiled with VS 2010.

I'm not sure about MinGW compatibility.

If you are looking for command line compilers, Microsoft has released two different SDKs for Windows 7 that include the command line compilers. The first SDK (for .NET 3.5) includes the VS 2008 compilers. The second SDK (for .NET 4.0) includes the VS 2010 compilers.

Update: The file PCbuild\readme.txt in the source distribution of each version of Python includes the version of Visual Studio used to make the binaries.