One of the most used developer environment on Windows is MSYS, MSYS's MINGW is a Cygwin environment working on Windows, is very easy to setup and as it is an enclosed environment is not affected by other software on your computer.

The most recent information about MSYS is on the official webpage: https://www.msys2.org/ and latest installation instructions are on the site: https://www.msys2.org/wiki/MSYS2-installation/, there you can find lot of information.

The MinGW32 & MinGW64 environments can be used to compile Native Windows binaries using a linux toolchain (gcc, bash, etc.)

In order to install MSYS on your system, you need few steps:

1. Download the latest version from: https://github.com/msys2/msys2-installer/releases, there you will find several packages, the most easy to use is msys2-x86_64-YYYYMMDD.exe
2. Execute the msys2-x86_64-YYYYMMDD.exe file
   
   And accept the default options:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   On the last window, deselect the «Run MSYS2 now» option and and the installation pressing the «Finish» button.
   
   
3. Run the MINGW64 environment from the Start Menu
   
   
   
4. Once you open the console execute the command pacman -Syuu --needed --noconfirm several times until you get the message: there is nothing to do, is possible what the window close, if is the case, open again the environment and run the command again.
   
   
   
   
   
5. When you end this step you have a full working MSYS environment

Visit the https://www.msys2.org/docs/environments/ URL if you want to know more about the differences between environments.

 

[BigOnYa]

Nice tutorial. Thanks!

 

[lordelan]

Very cool, thanks for the write up!

 

[Slinger]

Some more tidbits in case anyone finds it interesting: there is also an original msys (not to be confused with msys2), which is part of the MinGW project (not to be confused with mingw-w64): https://osdn.net/projects/mingw/

But all of these are in many ways the "old" version of these tools. Technically the mingw-w64 project was forked from mingw because its maintainers felt uneasy about accepting certain contributions that would add 64-bit support (long history about both principles and legal concerns). The original msys was just a way of providing a UI for mingw (a simple terminal with bash), while msys2 seems to be a whole different beast with its own package manager. A bit too much in my taste, but still probably the best way of accessing the mingw-w64 tools if you are on windows.

Mingw-w64 itself is also available on most gnu/linux distributions, making it possible to cross compile binaries (both 32 and 64 bit) for the poor windows users without having the leave the comfort of a real OS yourself. (plus you don't need anything like msys2)