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Comment by yellowapple

11 days ago

I don't get why people go through all these flaming hoops and hurdles to deal with MSVC when MinGW and MinGW-w64/MSYS2 are options. In the latter case you even still get (mostly complete) MSVC ABI-compatibility if you compile with clang.

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yellowapple

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grub5000  11 days ago

MinGW and MinGW-64/MSYS2 are just as inscrutable, fragile and new-user-hostile. The fact that you have to choose between MinGW (which has a 64 bit version) or MinGW64 (completely separate codebases maintained by different people as far as I can tell) is just the first in a long obstacle course of decisions, traps, and unexplained acronyms/product names. There are dozens of different versions, pre-built toolchains and packages to throw you off-course if you choose the wrong one.

If you're just a guy trying to compile a C application on Windows, and you end up on the mingw-w64 downloads page, it's not exactly smooth sailing: https://www.mingw-w64.org/downloads/

  • yellowapple  9 days ago

    > If you're just a guy trying to compile a C application on Windows, and you end up on the mingw-w64 downloads page, it's not exactly smooth sailing: https://www.mingw-w64.org/downloads/

    One of the options on that page is MSYS2, which I specifically listed above alongside MinGW-w64. And that download page is much smoother sailing: https://www.msys2.org/

    There are other options on the MinGW-w64 page, but most of those are for cross-compiling from non-Windows operating systems (which conceivably could include something running on WSL these days), and of the Windows-host options, the only two with “many” packages are Cygwin and MSYS2 (though WinLibs looks interesting).

forrestthewoods  11 days ago

MinGW/MSYS2 are flaming poop hurdles. That’s the bending over backwards to fake a hacky ass bad dev environment. Projects that only support MinGW on Windows are projecting “don’t take windows seriously”.

Supporting Windows without MinGW garbage is really really easy. Only supporting MinGW is saying “I don’t take this platform seriously so you should probably just ignore this project”.