A Simple Explanation Of What Is MinGW
Answer : MinGW is a complete GCC toolchain (including half a dozen frontends, such as C, C++, Ada, Go, and whatnot) for the Windows platform which compiles for and links to the Windows OS component C Runtime Library in msvcrt.dll. Rather it tries to be minimal (hence the name). This means, unlike Cygwin, MinGW does not attempt to offer a complete POSIX layer on top of Windows, but on the other hand it does not require you to link with a special compatibility library. It therefore also does not have any GPL-license implications for the programs you write (notable exception: profiling libraries, but you will not normally distribute those so that does not matter). The newer MinGW-w64 comes with a roughly 99% complete Windows API binding (excluding ATL and such) including x64 support and experimental ARM implementations. You may occasionally find some exotic constant undefined, but for what 99% of the people use 99% of the time, it just works perfectly well. You can also use t...