MinGW-w64

Why choose mingw-w64 over mingw?

mingw-w64 is a fork of the mingw project.

To date, numpy and scipy have used versions of the mingw compilers to create 32-bit binary distributions on Windows. mingw-w64 has some major advantages over mingw, including:

  • support for compiling 64-bit extensions (as well as 32-bit);
  • large file support;
  • winpthread pthreads implementation, MIT licenced;
  • more active development.

The mingw-w64 project

The mingw-w64 project releases the supporting files to allow the standard gcc distribution to compile code that can:

Among the files the project provides are:

  • mingw-w64-headers – header files specific to the Windows implementation.
  • mingw-w64-crt – code for C / C++ runtime libraries (providing functions not directly or reliably available from the MSCRT);
  • mingw-w64-libraries – libraries for using POSIX threads (winpthreads), working with MSVC symbol name mangling (libmangle), Windows store compatibility (winstorecompat), structured exception handling (pseh);
  • mingw-w64-tools – tools for: generating DLL export definition (def) files (gendef); working with the Microsoft Interface Description Language (genidl, widl); modifying PE flags in Windows executable files (genpeimg).

The project has official source releases on sourceforge: see mingw-w64 source releases.

In order to use mingw-w64 implementations to compile real code, you will need a mingw-w64 compiler toolchain.

The compiler toolchain

To build software with mingw-w64 you will likely need:

  • the compiler (gcc, compiled from standard gcc sources), augumented with the mingw-w64 extensions, including Windows-specific headers and runtime libraries;
  • a build of the GNU binutils tools, containing utility programs such as ld, ar, dlltool.

C++ exception models

The mingw-w64 compiler can be built with different ways of handling C++ exceptions. See mingw-w64 exception handling and SO post on mingw-w64 exception handling for background.

The exception handling modes are:

Threading models

The mingw-w64 compiler can also be built with different threading models. The options are:

  • POSIX threads (full C++11/C11 threading features);
  • win32 threads (No C++11 multithreading features).

See these SO posts:

A more complete software build system

In practice, for building software, you will usually want a wider range of tools than just the compiler and binutils utilities. In particular you will probably want tools like the bash shell, make, and the GNU build system.

MSYS2 provides these. msys2 is the successor of msys. Msys2 is necessary as environment for the mingw build process on Windows. - http://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/MSYS2%20installation/

Official mingw-w64 GCC toolchains

‘recommended’ builds are available from the mingw-builds project via http://mingw-w64.sourceforge.net/download.php – for example:

These are common combinations of exception and thread models. You can find other combinations as well. Exception handling affects C++ development. Don’t ever link object code with different types of exception and/or thread handling!

Threads concerning the question ‘where to find mingw-w64 builds’:

Other sources of precompiled mingw-w64 compiled libraries

Recent mingw-w64 based tools and library packages together with sources and patches are available from archlinux as well as from the msys2 maintainers.

See also this mingw-w64 writeup for Qt.

Building a mingw-w64 based GCC toolchain on Windows

“mingw-builds” is a set of scripts and patches for compiling the GCC toolchain under Windows with the help of msys2 POSIX environment - https://github.com/niXman/mingw-builds/tree/develop recent ‘mingw-builds’ GCC toolchains can be downloaded from the mingw-w64 sf.net site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/Toolchains%20targetting%20Win64/Personal%20Builds/mingw-builds/