MinGW - Home

Please be aware that this site is being upgraded. You may find that the site acts sporadic, different or not at all while browsing during the periods of work. A copy has been made and you should be able to use the copy for reference. Book mark http://www.mingw.org/old/ so that you have a reference to the copy.

MinGW: A collection of freely available and freely distributable Windows specific header files and import libraries combined with GNU toolsets that allow one to produce native Windows programs that do not rely on any 3rd-party C runtime DLLs.

MSYS: A contraction of "Minimal SYStem", MSYS is a POSIX-like command line interpreter system, (CLI), offered as an alternative to the Windows Command Prompt, (a.k.a. cmd.exe). Conceived to facilitate the execution of the POSIX style build scripts commonly provided by Open Source projects, and to interpret the Makefiles which they generate, its CLI interprets the Bourne Shell command language, in order to execute the commands commonly invoked by such scripts.

Mailing Lists: We have several mailing lists you are encouraged to join and participate in. There is a general discussion list mingw-users@lists.sf.net for general MinGW questions and a general discussion list mingw-msys@lists.sf.net for questions more related to MSYS and to using the Minimal SYStem. Information for signup and links to the archives can be found by clicking here. You may search the archives using the "Search the archives" form found on the left side of every www.mingw.org page.

Packages, Release Candidates, etc. We've moved this information to the Download web page. We hope that you find our new look helpful.

Publications promoting MinGW: The following list are published works suggesting or requiring MinGW and/or MSYS as their Windows build system of choice.

For information on adding your publication to this list; send your queries to mingw-users-admin at list dot sourceforge dot net. Make certain the subject of your email doesn't look like it may be SPAM or it may be deleted without being read.