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Comment by forrestthewoods

9 days ago

Eww no. MingW is evil and no project should ever use it.

Just use Clang + MSVC STL + WinSDK. Very simple.

9 comments

forrestthewoods

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rdiddly  9 days ago

From the capitalization I can tell you and the parent might not be aware it's "minimal GNU for Windows" which I would tend to pronounce "min g w" and capitalize as "MinGW." I used to say ming. Now it's my little friend. Say hello to my little friend, mang.

snvzz  9 days ago

>MingW is evil

Care to elaborate?

  • forrestthewoods  9 days ago

    I've been shipping Windows software for 20+ years. Not one project I have ever worked on was based on MinGW. It's a gross hack that is ABI incompatible with the predominate ecosystem.

    In the year 2026 there is no reason to use MinGW. Just use Clang and target MSVC ABI. Cross-compiling Linux->Windows is very easy. Cross-compiling Windows->Linux is 1000x harder because Linux userspace is a clusterfuck of terrible design choices.

    If a project "supports Windows" by only way of MinGW then it doesn't really support Windows. It's fundamentally incompatible with how almost all Windows software is developed. It's a huge red flag and a clear indicator that the project doesn't actually care about supporting Windows.

    • troad  8 days ago

      >> It's a gross hack

      *taps on the name of this site*

      If I'm writing some cross-platform bit of software, my interest in supporting Windows is naturally in producing binaries that run on Windows.

      Why on earth should I give a flying toss how "almost all Windows software is developed", or which kinds of ABIs are BillG-kissed and approved? Good god. Talk about fetishising process over outcome.

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    • jezek2  8 days ago

      I think the issues you're referring to are related to C++ ABI which is inherently incompatible between different compilers (and sometimes versions). This can be sometimes issue for plugins, though sane programs always use C wrappers.

      I never had issues with C ABI, calling into other DLLs, creating DLLs, COM objects, or whatever. I fail to see what is fundamentally incompatible here.

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