MinGW Runtime

MinGW provides a complete Open Source programming tool set which is suitable for the development of native MS-Windows applications, and which do not depend on any 3rd-party C-Runtime DLLs. (It does depend on a number of DLLs provided by Microsoft themselves, as components of the operating system; most notable among these is MSVCRT.DLL, the Microsof... t C runtime library. Additionally, threaded applications must ship with a freely distributable thread support DLL, provided as part of MinGW itself). MinGW compilers provide access to the functionality of the Microsoft C runtime and some language-specific runtimes. MinGW, being Minimalist, does not, and never will, attempt to provide a POSIX runtime environment for POSIX application deployment on MS-Windows. If you want POSIX application deployment on this platform, please consider Cygwin instead. Primarily intended for use by developers working on the native MS-Windows platform, but also available for cross-hosted use, (see note below -- you may need to follow the "read more" link to see it), MinGW includes: A port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), including C, C++, ADA and Fortran compilers; GNU Binutils for Windows (assembler, linker, archive manager) A command-line installer, with optional GUI front-end, (mingw-get) for MinGW and MSYS deployment on MS-Windows A GUI first-time setup tool (mingw-get-setup), to get you up and running with mingw-get. MSYS, a contraction of "Minimal SYStem", is a Bourne Shell command line interpreter system. Offered as an alternative to Microsoft's cmd.exe, this provides a general purpose command line environment, which is particularly suited to use with MinGW, for porting of many Open Source applications to the MS-Windows platform; a light-weight fork of Cygwin-1.3, it includes a small selection of Unix tools, chosen to facilitate that objective.Read More