Along with it provides MSYS, which stands for “Minimal System”. It provides GCC, make, debugger etc which is necessary for developing on Windows platform.

Additionally, threaded applications must ship with a freely distributable thread support DLL, provided as part of MinGW itself). (It does depend on a number of DLLs provided by Microsoft themselves, as components of the operating system most notable among these is MSVCRT.DLL, the Microsoft C runtime library. MinGW provides a complete Open Source programming tool set which is suitable for the development of native MS-Windows applications, and which do not depend on any 3rd-party C-Runtime DLLs. This is a project for providing native GCC compiler for Windows platform. MinGW stands for Minimalist GNU for Windows. So what is all this fuss about MinGW and Cygwin? What it is? And most importantly why do I need it? So lets first take MinGW. Or if you have just heard these names and and you have wondered what these are, then this article is for you also. Even if you are not a developer, but still want to explore some Linux based utilities on your Windows Machine, this articles is for you too.

If you are using Linux and your are a big fan of shell and its other utilities like grep, ls, make and its compilers gcc and g++, and if you want these utils on Windows platform, then this articles is for you. MinGW and Cygwin - An Introduction and Differences Santosh 0

Cygwin or mingw