Node.js - Do I really need Visual Studio ? And Python 2.X or 3.X?

trying to install websockets on windows Node.js.

I am getting native extensions require Visual Studio and Python.

My question is : Is it possible to take another compiler? Or do I really need VS (3,6GB) Download or are there alternatives, since I don´t want to download that huge amount. Linux has GGC , I suppose. And do I need Python 2.X or Python 3.X.

Thanks for the replies. Have a nice day.

You'll need visual studio in order to get the C++ compilers. You can pull down Visual Studio 2010 Express here, which is a much smaller download (694MB). For python, you'll need 2.6 or 2.7 as described on the node.js wiki on github.

Another alternate is to simply use the binaries already supplied by the node.js team. If you go this route, you won't have to compile the source yourself. From what I can tell, node should already support websockets. See a tutorial on how to set up a server using websockets here.