Building Python using Microsoft Visual C++ ------------------------------------------ This directory is used to build CPython for Microsoft Windows NT version 5.1 or higher (Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, or later) on 32 and 64 bit platforms. Using this directory requires an installation of Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 (MSVC 10.0) of any edition. The specific requirements are as follows: Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition Required for building 32-bit Debug and Release configuration builds. The Python build solution pcbuild.sln makes use of Solution Folders, which this edition does not support. Any time pcbuild.sln is opened or reloaded by Visual C++, a warning about Solution Folders will be displayed which can be safely dismissed with no impact on your ability to build Python. Visual Studio 2010 Professional Edition Required for building 64-bit Debug and Release configuration builds Visual Studio 2010 Premium Edition Required for building Release configuration builds that make use of Profile Guided Optimization (PGO), on either platform. Installing Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2010 is highly recommended to avoid LNK1123 errors. All you need to do to build is open the solution "pcbuild.sln" in Visual Studio, select the desired combination of configuration and platform, then build with "Build Solution" or the F7 keyboard shortcut. You can also build from the command line using the "build.bat" script in this directory. The solution is configured to build the projects in the correct order. The solution currently supports two platforms. The Win32 platform is used to build standard x86-compatible 32-bit binaries, output into this directory. The x64 platform is used for building 64-bit AMD64 (aka x86_64 or EM64T) binaries, output into the amd64 sub-directory which will be created if it doesn't already exist. The Itanium (IA-64) platform is no longer supported. See the "Building for AMD64" section below for more information about 64-bit builds. Four configuration options are supported by the solution: Debug Used to build Python with extra debugging capabilities, equivalent to using ./configure --with-pydebug on UNIX. All binaries built using this configuration have "_d" added to their name: python34_d.dll, python_d.exe, parser_d.pyd, and so on. Both the build and rt (run test) batch files in this directory accept a -d option for debug builds. If you are building Python to help with development of CPython, you will most likely use this configuration. PGInstrument, PGUpdate Used to build Python in Release configuration using PGO, which requires Premium Edition of Visual Studio. See the "Profile Guided Optimization" section below for more information. Build output from each of these configurations lands in its own sub-directory of this directory. The official Python releases are built using these configurations. Release Used to build Python as it is meant to be used in production settings, though without PGO. Legacy support -------------- You can find build directories for older versions of Visual Studio and Visual C++ in the PC directory. The legacy build directories are no longer actively maintained and may not work out of the box. Currently, the only legacy build directory is PC\VS9.0, for Visual Studio 2008 (9.0). C Runtime --------- Visual Studio 2010 uses version 10 of the C runtime (MSVCRT10). The executables no longer use the "Side by Side" assemblies used in previous versions of the compiler. This simplifies distribution of applications. The run time libraries are available under the VC/Redist folder of your Visual Studio distribution. For more info, see the Readme in the VC/Redist folder. Sub-Projects ------------ The CPython project is split up into several smaller sub-projects which are managed by the pcbuild.sln solution file. Each sub-project is represented by a .vcxproj and a .vcxproj.filters file starting with the name of the sub-project. These sub-projects fall into a few general categories: The following sub-projects represent the bare minimum required to build a functioning CPython interpreter. If nothing else builds but these, you'll have a very limited but usable python.exe: pythoncore .dll and .lib python .exe kill_python kill_python.exe, a small program designed to kill any instances of python(_d).exe that are running and live in the build output directory; this is meant to avoid build issues due to locked files make_buildinfo, make_versioninfo helpers to provide necessary information to the build process These sub-projects provide extra executables that are useful for running CPython in different ways: pythonw pythonw.exe, a variant of python.exe that doesn't open a Command Prompt window pylauncher py.exe, the Python Launcher for Windows, see http://docs.python.org/3/using/windows.html#launcher pywlauncher pyw.exe, a variant of py.exe that doesn't open a Command Prompt window _testembed _testembed.exe, a small program that embeds Python for testing purposes, used by test_capi.py These are miscellaneous sub-projects that don't really fit the other categories. By default, these projects do not build in Debug configuration: _freeze_importlib _freeze_importlib.exe, used to regenerate Python\importlib.h after changes have been made to Lib\importlib\_bootstrap.py bdist_wininst ..\Lib\distutils\command\wininst-10.0[-amd64].exe, the base executable used by the distutils bdist_wininst command python3dll python3.dll, the PEP 384 Stable ABI dll xxlimited builds an example module that makes use of the PEP 384 Stable ABI, see Modules\xxlimited.c The following sub-projects are for individual modules of the standard library which are implemented in C; each one builds a DLL (renamed to .pyd) of the same name as the project: _ctypes _ctypes_test _decimal _elementtree _hashlib _msi _multiprocessing _overlapped _socket _testcapi _testbuffer _testimportmultiple pyexpat select unicodedata winsound The following Python-controlled sub-projects wrap external projects. Note that these external libraries are not necessary for a working interpreter, but they do implement several major features. See the "Getting External Sources" section below for additional information about getting the source for building these libraries. The sub-projects are: _bz2 Python wrapper for version 1.0.6 of the libbzip2 compression library Homepage: http://www.bzip.org/ _lzma Python wrapper for the liblzma compression library, using pre-built binaries of XZ Utils version 5.0.5 Homepage: http://tukaani.org/xz/ _ssl Python wrapper for version 1.0.1j of the OpenSSL secure sockets library, which is built by ssl.vcxproj Homepage: http://www.openssl.org/ Building OpenSSL requires nasm.exe (the Netwide Assembler), version 2.10 or newer from http://www.nasm.us/ to be somewhere on your PATH. More recent versions of OpenSSL may need a later version of NASM. If OpenSSL's self tests don't pass, you should first try to update NASM and do a full rebuild of OpenSSL. If you use the Tools\buildbot\external(-amd64).bat method for getting sources, it also downloads a version of NASM which the ssl build script will add to PATH. If you like to use the official sources instead of the files from python.org's subversion repository, Perl is required to build the necessary makefiles and assembly files. ActivePerl is available from http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/ The svn.python.org version contains pre-built makefiles and assembly files. The build process makes sure that no patented algorithms are included. For now RC5, MDC2 and IDEA are excluded from the build. You may have to manually remove $(OBJ_D)\i_*.obj from ms\nt.mak if using official sources; the svn.python.org-hosted version is already fixed. The ssl.vcxproj sub-project simply invokes PCbuild/build_ssl.py, which locates and builds OpenSSL. build_ssl.py attempts to catch the most common errors (such as not being able to find OpenSSL sources, or not being able to find a Perl that works with OpenSSL) and give a reasonable error message. If you have a problem that doesn't seem to be handled correctly (e.g., you know you have ActivePerl but we can't find it), please take a peek at build_ssl.py and suggest patches. Note that build_ssl.py should be able to be run directly from the command-line. The ssl sub-project does not have the ability to clean the OpenSSL build; if you need to rebuild, you'll have to clean it by hand. _sqlite3 Wraps SQLite 3.8.3.1, which is itself built by sqlite3.vcxproj Homepage: http://www.sqlite.org/ _tkinter Wraps version 8.6.1 of the Tk windowing system. Homepage: http://www.tcl.tk/ Unlike the other external libraries listed above, Tk must be built separately before the _tkinter module can be built. This means that a pre-built Tcl/Tk installation is expected in ..\externals\tcltk (tcltk64 for 64-bit) relative to this directory. See "Getting External Sources" below for the easiest method to ensure Tcl/Tk is built. Getting External Sources ------------------------ The last category of sub-projects listed above wrap external projects Python doesn't control, and as such a little more work is required in order to download the relevant source files for each project before they can be built. The buildbots must ensure that all libraries are present before building, so the easiest approach is to run either external.bat or external-amd64.bat (depending on platform) in the ..\Tools\buildbot directory from ..\, i.e.: C:\python\cpython\PCbuild>cd .. C:\python\cpython>Tools\buildbot\external.bat This extracts all the external sub-projects from http://svn.python.org/projects/external via Subversion (so you'll need an svn.exe on your PATH) and places them in ..\externals (relative to this directory). It is also possible to download sources from each project's homepage, though you may have to change the names of some folders in order to make things work. For instance, if you were to download a version 5.0.7 of XZ Utils, you would need to extract the archive into ..\externals\xz-5.0.5 anyway, since that is where the solution is set to look for xz. The same is true for all other external projects. The external(-amd64).bat scripts will also build a debug build of Tcl/Tk, but there aren't any equivalent batch files for building release versions of Tcl/Tk currently available. If you need to build a release version of Tcl/Tk, just take a look at the relevant external(-amd64).bat file and find the two nmake lines, then call each one without the 'DEBUG=1' parameter, i.e.: The external-amd64.bat file contains this for tcl: nmake -f makefile.vc DEBUG=1 MACHINE=AMD64 INSTALLDIR=..\..\tcltk64 clean all install So for a release build, you'd call it as: nmake -f makefile.vc MACHINE=AMD64 INSTALLDIR=..\..\tcltk64 clean all install Note that the above command is called from within ..\externals\tcl-8.6.1.0\win (relative to this directory); don't forget to build Tk as well as Tcl! This will be cleaned up in the future; http://bugs.python.org/issue15968 tracks adding a new tcltk.vcxproj file that will build Tcl/Tk and Tix the same way the other external projects listed above are built. Building for AMD64 ------------------ The build process for AMD64 / x64 is very similar to standard builds, you just have to set x64 as platform. In addition, the HOST_PYTHON environment variable must point to a Python interpreter (at least 2.4), to support cross-compilation from Win32. Note that Visual Studio requires Professional Edition or better in order to build 64-bit binaries. Profile Guided Optimization --------------------------- The solution has two configurations for PGO. The PGInstrument configuration must be built first. The PGInstrument binaries are linked against a profiling library and contain extra debug information. The PGUpdate configuration takes the profiling data and generates optimized binaries. The build_pgo.bat script automates the creation of optimized binaries. It creates the PGI files, runs the unit test suite or PyBench with the PGI python, and finally creates the optimized files. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e7k32f4k(VS.100).aspx for more on this topic. Static library -------------- The solution has no configuration for static libraries. However it is easy to build a static library instead of a DLL. You simply have to set the "Configuration Type" to "Static Library (.lib)" and alter the preprocessor macro "Py_ENABLE_SHARED" to "Py_NO_ENABLE_SHARED". You may also have to change the "Runtime Library" from "Multi-threaded DLL (/MD)" to "Multi-threaded (/MT)". Visual Studio properties ------------------------ The PCbuild solution makes heavy use of Visual Studio property files (*.props). The properties can be viewed and altered in the Property Manager (View -> Other Windows -> Property Manager). The property files used are (+-- = "also imports"): * debug (debug macro: _DEBUG) * pginstrument (PGO) * pgupdate (PGO) +-- pginstrument * pyd (python extension, release build) +-- release +-- pyproject * pyd_d (python extension, debug build) +-- debug +-- pyproject * pyproject (base settings for all projects, user macros like PyDllName) * release (release macro: NDEBUG) * sqlite3 (used only by sqlite3.vcxproj) * x64 (AMD64 / x64 platform specific settings) The pyproject property file defines _WIN32 and x64 defines _WIN64 and _M_X64 although the macros are set by the compiler, too. The GUI doesn't always know about the macros and confuse the user with false information. Your Own Extension DLLs ----------------------- If you want to create your own extension module DLL (.pyd), there's an example with easy-to-follow instructions in ..\PC\example\; read the file readme.txt there first.