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forrestthewoods | 14 days ago

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

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

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rdiddly|14 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.

forrestthewoods|14 days ago

I typically refer to it as “piece of garbage poop I don’t let infect my system”.

snvzz|14 days ago

>MingW is evil

Care to elaborate?

forrestthewoods|14 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.