Open Source Project Builds for Windows

Many open source projects originate in *nix environments. Windows ports often use outdated compiler versions, and are often not updated w/r security relevant components such as OpenSSL. For example, Python 2.7 on Windows is built with Visual Studio 2008 Professional - a version that is 7 years old... If you have an application built with Visual Studio 2010 (or any other Visual Studio version), and you have Python embedded in it, you have two problems:

  1. It is a very bad idea to mix different Visual C++ runtimes. See http://siomsystems.com/mixing-visual-studio-versions/ for an explanation. This means if you use the official libraries to link in Python, you are in for some nasty surprises.
  2. The official distribution does not contain debug libraries. For some reason I don’t fully understand the python libraries have different names for debug and release builds (rather than just be located in a different directory, as I would normally approach this). This means that you cannot easily build a working debug build of your project.

Plus, did I mention that OpenSSL included in plain vanilla Python 2.7 is ... 0.9?. So I decided to provide some updated builds for select projects.

Builds with Visual Studio 2010

  1. Python, version 2.7
  2. OpenSSL 1.0.1m
  3. TCL/TK version 8.6.1

Builds with Visual Studio 2013

  1. Python, version 3.3
  2. OpenSSL, version 1.0.1m
  3. TCL/TK, version 8.6.1

Going forward, I plan to include some more builds. The next one is going to be wxpython, which so far has resisted all my efforts.... SOON!