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Comment by the_mitsuhiko | Hacker News Reader

I would however make the argument that if you do have a native extension but you have no binary wheel, it's better for that code to be written in Rust than C. Usually for a rust binary extension to build you just need a recent rust compiler on your machine whereas making C/C++ things to work can be a nightmare from you needing to have the right version of cmake, Cons, header files, dependency libraries and more to be installed. I have a text file with common CFLAGS and LDFLAGS I need to set to install various database drivers and more.

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I tried once building a very simple Rust extension on Windows using the Anaconda Python distribution and had no luck. If I remember correctly it got stuck trying to find the VC++ compiler.

Cython extensions on the other hand work fine with the MinGW GCC compiler provided by Anaconda, although it's pretty old (version 5).

In my experience that is just the silly amount of variables you have to export to use the VC++ compiler and this is why they provide a dedicated terminal prompt for the VC++ compiler with all the right env vars loaded. I've struggled as well automating VC++ compilation in rust as a result.

If you're so inclined to revisit this using mingw with rust you can see how here https://rust-lang.github.io/rustup/installation/windows.html

This is far easier to automate imo

I forgot to mention that I didn't have VC++ installed at all (because it's not free from all points of view).

If I remember correctly I tried installing the MinGW based Rust toolchain too, but I'll try again with the instructions you've given me.

Finding where & how to use an installed VS instance (or selecting one) in automated tooling is solved by the criminally unknown, MIT licensed, MS supported, redistributable, vswhere tool: https://github.com/microsoft/vswhere

There used to be a "vcvarsall.bat" script that set everything up properly without opening a separate shell session. However I recall that it moved locations on every VC++ update. Does that even exist anymore?

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