w64devkit VS mingw-builds-binaries

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

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.