Comment by grub5000
5 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/
> 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).