mingw-builds-binaries VS MINGW-packages

I've been using these mingw64 builds, both for amd64 and i386 (i686). There are several others out there, like winlibs.com.

I noticed most tutorials recommend downloading the installer from a sourceforge page, https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/ but the official MinGW-w64 site provides a link to a GitHub page. https://github.com/niXman/mingw-builds-binaries/releases Which one is safer? Which one would you choose?

I've tried the latest MinGW-builds-binaries release, and gcc, g++ and mingw32-make seem to work just fine, I was even able to build a project using SDL2! gdb needed bcrypt.dll, so unfortunately that didn't work.

strip * can be run inside Linux, or in Windows I downloaded the posix-sjlj release for mingw64, & then appended its extracted bin directory to the Path environmental variable (from Start Menu type advanced system settings).

The https://github.com/niXman/mingw-builds-binaries repository is very new, it contains only the yaml file needed to build the toolchains with GitHub Actions.

Recently he created a new repository named https://github.com/niXman/mingw-builds-binaries which uses the scripts above with GitHub Actions to build windows binaries.

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)