MinGW

MinGW is designed to build native Windows binaries.

MingGW links with MSVCRT.

MingGW does not aim at being POSIX compliant.

It seems that this is the main difference to Cygwin which provides a POSIX compliant environment on a machine running Windows.

Cygwin uses MinGW to build its DLL.

Differences to MinGW-w64 seem to be

• MinGW-64 has a fully POSIX compliant printf() implementation
• MinGW only builds 32 bit binaries

Windows development

GCC options for Cygwin and MinGW