MINGW-packages VS w64devkit

Have never tried to cross compile using mingw, however this page came up on a quick Google search: https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages/issues/6341

Then you setup a proper GNU environment, either mingw, cygwin or WSL, get the prereqs and start compiling with the proper target. You can see the used build recipe with the https://packages.msys2.org/package/mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc package. (ie https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages/tree/master/mingw-w64-gcc)

If you take a look at the PKGBUILD file for mingw-w64-cmake base package, you'll see that it applies some patches that make sense for MinGW. Most notably, it makes Ninja the default build generator instead of Visual Studio.

Using built-in specs. COLLECT_GCC=gcc COLLECT_LTO_WRAPPER=F:/MameDev/msys64/mingw64/bin/../lib/gcc/x86_64-w64-mingw32/11.2.0/lto-wrapper.exe Target: x86_64-w64-mingw32 Configured with: ../gcc-11.2.0/configure --prefix=/mingw64 --with-local-prefix=/mingw64/local --build=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --target=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --with-native-system-header-dir=/mingw64/x86_64-w64-mingw32/include --libexecdir=/mingw64/lib --enable-bootstrap --enable-checking=release --with-arch=x86-64 --with-tune=generic --enable-languages=c,lto,c++,fortran,ada,objc,obj-c++,jit --enable-shared --enable-static --enable-libatomic --enable-threads=posix --enable-graphite --enable-fully-dynamic-string --enable-libstdcxx-filesystem-ts --enable-libstdcxx-time --disable-libstdcxx-pch --disable-libstdcxx-debug --enable-lto --enable-libgomp --disable-multilib --disable-rpath --disable-win32-registry --disable-nls --disable-werror --disable-symvers --with-libiconv --with-system-zlib --with-gmp=/mingw64 --with-mpfr=/mingw64 --with-mpc=/mingw64 --with-isl=/mingw64 --with-pkgversion='Rev6, Built by MSYS2 project' --with-bugurl=https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages/issues --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld --with-boot-ldflags='-pipe -Wl,--dynamicbase,--high-entropy-va,--nxcompat,--default-image-base-high -Wl,--disable-dynamicbase -static-libstdc++ -static-libgcc' 'LDFLAGS_FOR_TARGET=-pipe -Wl,--dynamicbase,--high-entropy-va,--nxcompat,--default-image-base-high' --enable-linker-plugin-flags='LDFLAGS=-static-libstdc++\ -static-libgcc\ -pipe\ -Wl,--dynamicbase,--high-entropy-va,--nxcompat,--default-image-base-high\ -Wl,--stack,12582912' Thread model: posix Supported LTO compression algorithms: zlib zstd gcc version 11.2.0 (Rev6, Built by MSYS2 project)

Try w64devkit https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

Click "View raw" to download. The executable is just ~3kB. If you'd like to try building it yourself, I distribute a Windows XP-friendly, no-installation-required C and C++ toolchain, w64devkit. The 32-bit toolchains are labeled "i686" (on the right under "Releases"). The build command (cc ...) is at the top of the source file.

I bundle my preferred tools together in a standalone compiler toolkit for Windows: w64devkit. Except Git and documentation (see the links in the README), that's essentially everything I need to be productive.

I have a Dockerfile here that goes through all the steps bootstrapping a Mingw-w64 toolchain from source: https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

FWIW, both GNU objcopy and GNU ld (including e.g. the XCOPY-deployable ones from w64devkit[1]) are perfectly capable[2] of turning binary data into MSVC-acceptable COFF files with start and end symbols, while Free Pascal, for example, straight up ships with a bin2obj tool; the MSVC toolset is the outlier here.

[1] https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

[2] https://www.devever.net/~hl/incbin

Sounds like an high priority issue to solve first. I distribute a toolchain that doesn't require installation and includes a debugger: w64devkit (see "Releases"). You can pluck out the gdb.exe since it's statically linked and doesn't depend on anything else in the kit.

This particular case is a Windows program due to Winsock, and I happen to include all the above tools, except SDL2, a small Mingw-w64 distribution, w64devkit. So it doesn't take much!

Similar project providing slightly fewer tools: https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit