Mingw-w64

Mingw-w64 is a free and open source software development environment to create Microsoft Windows applications. It was forked in 2005–2008 from MinGW (Minimalist GNU for Windows).

MinGW-w64
Original author(s)OneVision Software
Developer(s)Kai Tietz, Jonathan Yong, various GNU contributors
Initial release2005 (2005)
Stable release
7.0.0[1] / November 10, 2019 (2019-11-10)
Written inC, C++
Operating systemMicrosoft Windows
TypeCompiler
LicensePublic domain (headers), GNU General Public License (compiler and toolchain), Zope Public License
Websitemingw-w64.org

Mingw-w64 includes a port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GNU Binutils for Windows (assembler, linker, archive manager), a set of freely distributable Windows specific header files and static import libraries which enable the use of the Windows API, a Windows native build of the GNU Project's GNU Debugger, and miscellaneous utilities.

Mingw-w64 can be run either on the native Microsoft Windows platform, cross-hosted on Linux (or other Unix), or "cross-native" on MSYS2 or Cygwin. Mingw-w64 can generate 32- and 64-bit executables for x86 under the target names i686-w64-mingw32 and x86_64-w64-mingw32.

History

In 2005, Mingw-w64 was created by OneVision Software under clean room design principles, since the original MinGW project was not prompt on updating its code base, including the inclusion of several key new APIs and the much needed 64-bit support. In 2008, OneVision then donated the code to Kai Tietz, one of its lead developers, under the condition that it remain open source.[2] It was first submitted to the original MinGW project, but refused under suspicion of using non-public or proprietary information.[3][4][5] For many reasons, the lead developer and co-founder of the MinGW-w64 project, Kai Tietz, decided not to attempt further cooperation with MinGW.[6]

MinGW-w64 provides a more complete Win32 API implementation,[7] including:

  • better C99 support
  • POSIX Threads (pthreads) support (including the possibility to enable C++11 thread-related functionality in GCC's libstdc++)
  • GCC multilib, which allows users to install 32-bit and 64-bit libraries in parallel
  • Unicode entry point (wmain/wWinMain)
  • DDK (from ReactOS)
  • DirectX (from Wine)
  • Large file support
  • Win64 support
  • Structured Exception Handling (SEH) instead of DWARF or sjlj on x86-64 (from gcc 4.8+)
  • Some useful tools such as gendef (an improved version of MinGW's pexports utility), and widl (an MIDL compiler from Wine).

Additionally, the Mingw-w64 project maintains winpthreads, a wrapper library similar to pthreads-win32, with the main difference that it allows GCC to use it as a threads library resulting in functional C++11 thread libraries <thread>, <future>, and <mutex>.

MSYS2

MSYS2 ("minimal system 2") is a software distribution and a development platform for Microsoft Windows, based on Mingw-w64 and Cygwin, that helps to deploy code from the Unix world on Windows.[8]

MSYS2 shares this goal of bringing Unix code to Windows machines with several other projects, most notably Cygwin and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). WSL lets Linux ELF binaries run on Windows, with limited support for kernel calls and significant limitations in graphical applications. Cygwin provides a full POSIX environment (as a windows DLL) in which applications, compiled as Windows EXEs, run as they would under Unix.[9]

Instead of providing a full environment like Cygwin does, MSYS2 tasks itself with being a development and deployment platform.[10] MSYS2 installs 3 sets of environments, each with a separate set of programs and libraries. Two of them, called 32-bit MinGW-w64 and 64-bit MinGW-w64, are simply composed of native compilers, build tools and libraries that can be directly used to build native Windows 32-bit or 64-bit programs. The final programs built with the two native environments don't use any kind of emulation and can run or be distributed like native Windows programs. The third environment installed, called MSYS2, instead provides an emulated POSIX environment, like Cygwin, with a package manager and standard Unix system tools. This way, when managing MSYS2 itself, standard Unix tools can be used unmodified by using the emulated environment. It's also possible to install build tools in the MSYS2 emulated environment in case the user wants to build software that depends on the POSIX emulation layer instead of the native API.

The main MSYS2 environment provides a package manager (Pacman from Arch Linux), a bash shell, and other Unix programs. It uses a runtime library msys-2.0.dll (~20MB) that is derived from the Cygwin library cygwin1.dll, and is updated regularly to keep track of the Cygwin development. It is intended as a development environment, one that developers can manager (using pacman) and run their tools with. Features judged unnecessary for development are removed.[10]

As with Cygwin, MSYS2 supports path translation for non-MSYS2 software launched from it. For example one can use the command notepad++ /c/Users/John/file.txt to launch an editor that will open the file with the Windows path C:\Users\John\file.txt.[11][10]

MSYS2 and its bash environment is used by Git and GNU Octave for their official Windows distribution.

Compiler

Most languages supported by GCC are supported on the Mingw-w64 port as well. These include C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, Fortran, and Ada. The GCC runtime libraries are used (libstdc++ for C++, libgfortran for Fortran, etc.). A packaging of LLVM's clang to mingw-w64 is also provided by MSYS2. It supports ARM for Windows (aarch64-w64-mingw32 and armv7-w64-mingw32).[12][13]

Binaries (executables or DLLs) generated with different C++ compilers (like Mindw-w64 GCC and Visual Studio) are in general not link compatible due to the use of different ABIs and name mangling schemes caused by the differences in C++ runtimes. However, compiled C code is link compatible.[14] Clang is an exception, as it mostly supports MSVC's C++ ABI on Windows.[15]

The binutils documentation has up-to-date information about its handling of various windows-specific formats and special tools for doing so.[16][17]

gollark: ++remind 9h book vaccine
gollark: ++remind "17:34 tomorrow" implement geometry, recoll on server
gollark: ++remind 6d-10m bring water, earphones
gollark: ++remind 1h do so
gollark: ++remind 8h attain earphones

References
  1. "MinGW-w64 version history". MinGW-w64 site. Retrieved 2019-11-26.
  2. "(MinGW-w64) History". MinGW-w64 Wiki. Retrieved 2016-02-18.
  3. Danny Smith (13 August 2007). "Re: Sub project for w64 header & crt". Newsgroup: comp.gnu.mingw.devel. Usenet: 000001c7dd83$9ae74310$fe6d65da@THOMAS. Retrieved 23 July 2020. From a cursory spot check of a few files, the crt sources in particular appear to contain too much undocumented material that I suspect may be derived from proprietary sources. I have since avoided looking at the mingw-w64 sources to avoid any taint of copyright abuse. I could well be wrong, but I would rather be safe than jeopardise the future of the mingw32, which has tried to maintain a "clean-room" ethic during its development.
  4. "(MinGW-w64) History". MinGW-w64 Wiki. Retrieved 2016-02-18.
  5. Marshall, Keith (19 July 2009). "Re: Harmonizing mingwrt / w32api with mingw-w64". MinGW-dvlpr (Mailing list). Retrieved 12 June 2014. However, we would require a formal audit of mingw-64 code, to ensure conformance with our requirements for truly open documentation of sources, before [merge of mingw-w64] could be completed.
  6. Tietz, Kai (20 July 2014). "Re: Harmonizing mingwrt / w32api with mingw-w64". MinGW-dvlpr (Mailing list). Retrieved 12 June 2014.
  7. "MinGW-w64". MinGW-w64.org. Retrieved 30 May 2013.
  8. MSYS2: official homepage, code repository
  9. https://medium.com/@borekb/zsh-via-msys2-on-windows-3964a943b1ce
  10. https://github.com/msys2/msys2/wiki/How-does-MSYS2-differ-from-Cygwin
  11. Example taken from the overview article https://www.booleanworld.com/get-unix-linux-environment-windows-msys2
  12. "Package: mingw-w64-x86_64-clang". MSYS2 Packages. Retrieved 12 February 2020.
  13. Storsjö, Martin (23 April 2020). "mstorsjo/llvm-mingw".
  14. http://mingw.org/wiki/Interoperability_of_Libraries_Created_by_Different_Compiler_Brands
  15. "MSVC compatibility". Clang 11 documentation.
  16. "ld: win32". sourceware.org.
  17. "GNU Binary Utilities Documentation". sourceware.org.
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