It seems strange to me that they use Visual Studio rather than mingw/msys. Do any HN readers know why that is?

I don't know why they don't, but I'd give serious thought to not supporting Windows at all if I had to use mingw/msys. And this is coming from somebody whose first order of business on a Windows machine is to install cygwin. The environment is just Not Friendly.

Visual Studio is the vendor-suggested way of building C++ and it's free besides; there's not really a good reason not to use it.

I've found mingw and msys to be very fast and easy to use.

In my experience it's been Cygwin that's a bloated, non-intuitive, awful monstrosity to be avoided at all costs. I've had great difficulties in the past with Cygwin DLL's, particularly when a program comes with its own Cygwin DLL which is a different version than the system Cygwin.

I haven't used Cygwin since 2005 or so due to these difficulties.

For Windows virtualization solutions, my first stop these days would be Virtualbox, qemu or the like. Second preference is mingw/msys.

I've also had a positive experience with a little-known solution called Colinux [1], essentially a Windows port of another little-known technology in the Linux mainline kernel called user-mode Linux. Colinux requires some setup, especially if you want graphics (for GUI work, you need some remote desktop with a Windows client like Xming or VNC). Again, I'd recommend VirtualBox or qemu for casual use, but Colinux is an interesting technology, and I've found it gets very good performance.

My negative experiences with Cygwin were so great, it is only something I use when there is no alternative available. And in preference to all of these is simply using Linux, but sometimes that's simply not an acceptable alternative to Windows (i.e. when you're making a product that you want to run on all popular OS's, supporting only Linux seems like a recipe for disaster. See Sage [2] for an example of an open-source project whose official line on Windows compatbility is "use Virtualbox.")

[1] http://www.colinux.org/

[2] http://sagemath.org

All your points (well, aside from mingw itself) are great ones. Cygwin is 100% a monster. But it's a monster that works the way I expect it to. MSYS is often lacking in things I consider basic that I miss going from OS X to Windows and trying to configure it is a super-pain-in-the-ass.

Colinux is actually pretty cool, but the need for an X server and the setup time is a pain in the ass.

> It seems strange to me that they use Visual Studio rather than mingw/msys. Do any HN readers know why that is?

More widespread, easier to handle, more accepted among windows developers.

Because none of the core contributors use it and no one has contributed patches that make it work there.

(Windows contributor who did the VS2010 work)

Just after Visual Studio 2012 was released?

Yes. Also keep in mind that Visual Studio 2010 is the last one which will work on Windows XP and Windows Vista.

The binaries are still backwards compatible, I hope wherever the python dev team is building the binaries they aren't still running 32 bit or vista.

We closed 3.3 for features months ago (June, maybe?) and it wasn't released. I would have liked to move to 2012 myself but the timing wasn't right.

(I did the 2010 changes)