Talk:MinGW

Disadvantages

The article has a list of 5 issues related to using MinGW for OSdev. Here is my take on them:

• 1..3: They were probably obsolete even when the article was started. GCC 2.95 is ancient.
• 4: What does ELF have to do with anything?
• 5: Seems like the appropriate thing to do, given that MinGW is a UNIX-like environment and comes with a shell. Amusingly, Cygwin is recommended over MinGW because of this even if it is known to have the exact same behavior.

--Love4boobies 15:21, 17 December 2012 (CST)

MinGW has had quite its share of issues in the older days, with quite a few compiler and other software bugs being out there. Also, the key difference between mingw and cygwin is that the former is a windows port of the GNU toolchain designed to build Windows apps without getting into the mess that was Visual Studio, while the latter primarily aims at providing the closest thing to a true unix environment.

Things on the mingw side have certainly gotten better over the past decade, but since I have migrated to a native linux install (via Cygwin) I only recall MinGW being an ugly thing for which you were lucky if it would survive if you truly applied some stress on it. I think this article needs a rewrite done by someone that is actually up to date with it.

- Combuster 07:39, 6 January 2013 (CST)

Under Windows, I generally use MinGW, which can be used to build GCC cross-compilers and cross-Binutils. However, I do admit that I've had my share of problems with it because you never know whether something will build out of the box or whether you will need to spend a lot of energy tracking down and fixing build problems. This doesn't seem to occur as often with Cygwin. Whether the fault belongs to MinGW or to the failing source code is not relevant to most of the users here, which is why I am inclined to think OSDev.org recommending Cygwin over MinGW is still the right decision. --Love4boobies 22:11, 6 January 2013 (CST)

Minimal?

"MinGW is a 10+ megabyte download and, like Cygwin, now requires a helper DLL (MSYS-1.0.DLL). So it's no longer "minimal"."

It doesn't. MinGW doesn't require any DLLs (apart from, of course, the runtime libraries). Perhaps somebody mistook MinGW for MSYS. And it is minimal - it doesn't try to emulate POSIX, it uses default Windows' libraries instead. It's just a Windows port of GNU toolchain, nothing more.

Fanael 12:55, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

The nomenclature of the MinGW project is confusing as to what is contained in "MinGW" and what is "add-on", but I would tend to agree that MSYS is apart from the MinGW proper. Feel free to reword the lead. -- Solar 13:47, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure how, really. I'd probably delete the mentioned sentences entirely, but then the thing about MinGW make would look silly (a list with one element?). Any other ideas? -- Fanael 14:20, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Better? -- Solar 15:17, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, now it looks better. -- Fanael 15:49, 8 February 2011 (UTC)