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Comment by m1keil | Hacker News Reader

I started using python at around 2.6/2.7, and while it was easy to install python on windows, anything that involved non pure python was a nightmare.

Back in these days you had no wheels and I think it was at least a partial reason for why conda was a thing.

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Yeah, back then, `pip install` just didn't work for anything written in C. I seem to remember a Windows-specific site with builds of popular extension packages - Cython, lxml, OpenSSL, and the like. It was unofficial, and you couldn't use a package manager to install them, but after manually downloading them, they tended to work.

Wheels, Conda, and WSL, helped - now, all the R&D guys at work use Python on Windows with PyTorch, TensorFlow, and all that without problems. I'm also using (mini)conda (on Linux) instead of virtualenv - it's nice because I don't need to worry about all my venvs breaking after an OS upgrade.

Anyway, compared to those days (I started with 2.4 on Windows, switched to Linux around 2.7), working with Python on Windows is at least feasible.

The big problem with installing packages written in C is that on Windows, you needed the matching version of VC++ to build, which wasn't anywhere as easy to obtain as the standard build tools on Unix platforms, usually (where they'd often even be preinstalled, and if not, it's one apt/yum invocation away).

The eventual solution for this was something called "Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7" - which was pretty much just enough of VC++ command line tools packaged to make it possible to build things.

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