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Comment by mark-r | Hacker News Reader

I have no choice, because 3.9 isn't supported on Windows 7. I've always wondered what feature of Windows was so important that they had to drop compatibility with older versions, it's intentionally a very stable interface.

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There is a discussion with some insight into the technical reasons why they don't support Windows 7: https://discuss.python.org/t/windows-7-support-for-python-3-... (summary: api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll is not available on Windows 7, so they'd have to switch from static import to feature detection + dynamic import in several places; and the Python team don't have access to Windows 7 so they can't do testing).

An unofficial Python installer for Windows 7 exists: https://github.com/adang1345/PythonWin7 (it uses an unofficial implementation of api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll).

Thanks for that insight. The part about not being able to do testing doesn't surprise me, it's to be expected.

Windows 7 support ended on 14 Jan 2020. It makes sense not to officially support it.

Have you tried building 3.9 from source to see if there's a particular API that's unsupported?

Sure, I wouldn't expect to get any help from the Python folks if I had some trouble. I was hoping for more of a don't care philosophy. But the installer goes out of its way to disallow installing it.

No, I haven't tried to build from source. That's a rabbit hole I'm not particularly interested in jumping down.

These might be interesting to you: https://github.com/indygreg/python-build-standalone/releases

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