Back when Linux was a janky corner case run by loosely-coordinated hackers with sometimes-impractical ideological constraints, when brilliant people were expending heaps of effort to enable support for it, that was fantastic.
Now that the janky corner case is a proprietary system run by cyber-landlords whose constraints are just... hostility, I feel less positive about the work being done to support it.
On the one hand it's really great that these people care so deeply about making these tools usable for everyone. And I applaud them for doing it, absolutely not suggesting they should change course, just pondering.
But... now instead of thinking "wow I'm so glad this work is happening" I do rather think "wow imagine what those wonderful people could achieve if they didn't have to work on this".
Well, "they don't "have" to work on it, as was pointed out several times the SciPy devs are volunteers.
Indeed most of the story is explaining why SciPy just had to hope someone else would make a open source Fortran compiler for windows, and it looks like it was mainly NVidia devs that provided salvation
It's not even that. SciPy is paying the price of the idiotic (and highly biased) decisions of Python core-dev members who chose MSVC over MinGW for Python on Windows. (And their motivation is derived from Microsoft sponsorship. A bunch of people on core-dev list are straight-up Microsoft employees, who are paid by Microsoft to be on that list, and, on top of that, Microsoft pays for CI servers for CPython project).
This whole problem could've been avoided if Python just didn't use proprietary tools in its toolchain.
I'm not knowledgeable enough about portability of LLVM, but if it's binary compatible with GCC-compiled stuff (or can be made such) on Windows, then, sure.
See, the problem here is that if you want interop, with, eg. Ruby, Erlang, R, Perl, Go and probably a bunch of others (the only other exception I know of is PHP (PECL) that uses MS toolchain), then you have to produce compatible binaries.
Ideally, it shouldn't be about the flavor of compiler, but be some kind of official documented format... that many compilers can easily implement. But, since de facto this format is "just use GCC", then, in practical terms, either use GCC, or pretend you use GCC.
BTW, in the quest to find out how other popular languages deal with this problem, I discovered that things can actually be even worse than Python. Enter JavaScript (Node.js)!
In JavaScript, you cannot distribute pre-built native modules, only source code. And if it compiles, then it compiles, and if it doesn't -- it's the user's fault.
Now that the janky corner case is a proprietary system run by cyber-landlords whose constraints are just... hostility, I feel less positive about the work being done to support it.
On the one hand it's really great that these people care so deeply about making these tools usable for everyone. And I applaud them for doing it, absolutely not suggesting they should change course, just pondering.
But... now instead of thinking "wow I'm so glad this work is happening" I do rather think "wow imagine what those wonderful people could achieve if they didn't have to work on this".