Last Updated on: 26th December 2023, 12:17 pm
Web site: mingw-w64.org
Category: Others
Platform: Windows, Linux, OS X
License: Public Domain, GNU GPL, Zope Public
Interface: CLI
Wikipedia: MinGW-w64
First release: 2005
MinGW-w64 – a free and open source software development environment to create Microsoft Windows PE applications. Mingw-w64 is an advancement of the original MinGW project, created to support the GCC compiler on Windows systems. It has forked it in 2007 in order to provide support for 64 bits and new APIs. It has since then gained widespread use and distribution.
Mingw-w64 was started in order to port an ObjectiveC application to 64bit Windows in 2005. The only compiler targeting Windows that supported ObjectiveC was the GCC compiler from MinGW.
OneVision began clean room of the 64bit Windows API. The work was presented to the MinGW developers at mingw.org after the initial port of the GNU toolchain and the headers/startup sources were completed by OneVision?. It was rejected on the suspicion of using non-public proprietary sources of information ( additional infos).
The mingw-w64 project was then created as a fork of the original MinGW project to prevent the work from being lost. It was registered on sourceforge on August 2007, with the public code repository up by October 2007. In 2008, OneVision? donated the mingw-w64 code to Kai Tietz on the condition that it remains Open Source. Kai currently works on maintaining the GNU toolchain to support both 32bit and 64bit Windows.
