Question

When installing Cygwin, when selecting a C++ compiler I see the following options:
mingw-gcc-g++, gcc4-g++ and gcc-g++
Can anyone tell me the difference between these? And which would I would want to use?

Also what’s the point of the gcc-mingw-g++ headers?
What’s “Mingw32 support”?

Answer 1

• MinGW vs. Cygwin: There are two layers for porting unix applications to windows:

  • Cygwin. This tries to emulate environment closely, but that makes it more difficult to integrate with native applications. Cygwin library is dual-licensed GPL or commercial, so to link commercial application against it, you need to purchase a license.
  • MinGW. This is much lighter layer that only emulates some basic things and requires more porting effort to get the application working, but integrates better with native applications (paths are passed in native format and only converted inside the applications, does not use virtual mounts etc.). I believe the licensing is also more liberal.

  • In fact, Windows are POSIX compliant, so none of that should be actually needed. Windows Services For Unix from Microsoft should provide compatibility.

    The mingw compiler builds binaries using the MinGW libraries, the other variants use the cygwin1 library.

• gcc/gcc4 is just different versions.