MinGW is a development environment for native Microsoft Windows applications
Suggested by "Among The Living". Thanks, and a Tip of Santa's Cap!Welcome to MinGW.org
Home of the MinGW, MSYS and mingwPORT Projects
MinGW, a contraction of "Minimalist GNU for Windows", is a minimalist development environment for native Microsoft Windows applications.
MinGW provides a complete Open Source programming tool set which is suitable for the development of native MS-Windows applications, and which do not depend on any 3rd-party C-Runtime DLLs (only the Microsoft C runtime, MSVCRT).
MinGW compilers provide access to the functionality of the Microsoft C runtime and some language-specific runtimes. MinGW, being Minimalist, does not and will never attempt to provide a POSIX runtime environment for POSIX development. If you want POSIX development, please look at Cygwin instead.
MinGW includes:
* A port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), including C, C++, ADA and Fortran compilers;
* GNU Binutils for Windows (linker, archive manager)
* MSYS, a fork of Cygwin designed for running configure scripts and Makefiles
* Community-supported add-on tools and libraries (mingwPORTs)
* A graphical and a command-line installer for Windows
* Cross-compilers to build Windows applications on other platforms (e.g. Linux)
MSYS, a contraction of "Minimal SYStem", is a Bourne Shell command line interpreter system. Offered as an alternative to Microsoft's cmd.exe, this provides a general purpose command line environment, which is particularly suited to use with MinGW, for porting of many Open Source applications to the MS-Windows platform; it includes a small selection of Unix tools, chosen to facilitate that objective, and using it is a necessary prerequisite for building mingwPORTs.
mingwPORTs are user contributed additions to the MinGW software collection. Rather than providing these "add-ons" as precompiled binary packages, they are supplied in the form of interactive Bourne shell scripts, which guide the end user through the process of automatically downloading and patching original source code, then building and installing it. Users who wish to build any application from a mingwPORT must first install both MinGW and MSYS.
http://www.mingw.org/