MinGW
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
3recommend
4warn against
Dec 5, 2025first mention
Jun 9, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“the mingw workflow is otherwise quite good”
“The reasons I use MinGW is because it produces better compatible binaries on Windows”
Show 2 more
“my programs work even on Windows 2000”
Caveats and dissent
“trying to use MinGW was such a pain”
“There are some pretty useful abstractions and libraries that MinGW doesn't work with.”
Show 2 more
“Clang is the better alternative to MinGW”
“It's usually code compiled with Mingw that gets AV false-positives in Nim.”
Often compared with
Threads where it came up
- I Fixed Windows Native Development 6 mentions
- Go-legacy-winxp: Compile Golang 1.24 code for Windows XP 2 mentions
- OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system 1 mention
- Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March 1 mention
- RedSun: System user access on Win 11/10 and Server with the April 2026 Update 1 mention
- Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today? 1 mention
Also written as Mingw. Data: mingw.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 14
“the mingw workflow is otherwise quite good”
“trying to use MinGW was such a pain”
“if you have MinGW, this exact command-line invocation will probably work correctly”
“The reasons I use MinGW is because it produces better compatible binaries on Windows”
“we wouldn't probably need Mingw to build cross-platform apps”
“Now it's my little friend.”
“There are some pretty useful abstractions and libraries that MinGW doesn't work with.”
“my programs work even on Windows 2000”
“Clang is the better alternative to MinGW”
“Or you could install and old copy of Cygwin or MinGW.”
“I don't know if it's any better or worse than MinGW practically”
“It's usually code compiled with Mingw that gets AV false-positives in Nim.”
“The biggest issue I ran into was MinGW and GCC implement the FileSystem library differently”
“All I use is basically Firefox and a MinGW to have a bash”