[Numpy-discussion] Compiling for free on Windows32

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 1:17 AM, Fadhley Salim
<Fadhley.Salim@uk.calyon.com> wrote:
> I've been asked to provide Numpy & Scipy as python egg files.
> Unfortunately Numpy and Scipy do not make official releases of their
> product in .egg form for a Win32 platform - that means if I want eggs
> then I have to compile them myself.

Yes.

>
> At the moment my employer provides Visual Studio.Net 2003, which will
> compile no version of Numpy later than 1.1.1 - every version released
> subsequently cannot be compiled with VS2003. I've tried.

Yes, this is a visual studio bug.

>
> What I'd really like is some other compiler I can use, perhaps for free,
> but at a push as a free time-limited trial. I would use that to compile
> the eggs. Is anybody aware of another compiler that I can download and
> use without paying anything and will definitely compile Numpy on
> Windows?

The compilers that are regularly used to compile python on windows are
the mingw compilers. If you only need numpy and not scipy, there are
no dependencies, and only the C compiler is needed. It should compile
out of the box.

Otherwise, you will need to compile your own blas/lapack, which is
complicated on windows. The blas/lapack sources are to be downloaded
from netlib.org:

http://netlib.org/lapack/

You should not use the version 3.2 (3.1.1 is fine, and is the version
used to build the numpy binaries).

cheers,

David