We need to talk about Windows
summary
Builds Python from source across Linux Mac and Windows and shows why Windows forces a different approach: Visual Studio project files + msbuild, hard-coded external deps, and lack of repeatable caching mean ActiveState patch every version of the Python core to swap OpenSSL, which causes them to rebuild Python core for every Windows build and incur extra compute and disk cost. Plan is a new MSBuild system that can optionally consume prebuilt libs from the platform and be contributed upstream.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction to ActiveState
- 4:30ActiveState platform overview
- 7:04Building Python on Linux
- 8:52Building Python on macOS
- 10:01Challenges of Windows builds
- 14:27Workarounds and issues
- 16:13Future improvements
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