What is the difference between Orwell's MinGW and TDM Dev-C++ versions?

Question

I am a newbie at this and yesterday I installed Win 8.1 x64 so I would like to use the most suitable program for making my tasks in C/C++. Thanks

Forevermore

Answer 1

MinGW supports only 32 bit binaries, TDM supports 32 and 64 bit binaries (with usage of MinGW's API's).

• If you need a good GCC for Windows, with the drawback of 32 bit only, use MinGW.
• If you want to build 64 bit binaries too, you can use TDM.

Both released GCC 4.8 approximately at the same time, so there's no real difference in up-to-dateness.

My recommendation: Use the 3rd alternative: MinGW-w64 instead - it's a extended MinGW with support for 64 Bit. See here for a short description of MinGW-w64.

Whatever choice you make, better use official developers website for downloading (not Orwell's) to get most up-to-date version.

• MinGW
• MinGW-w64
• TDM-GCC

Btw., you'll find a good overview there, what makes one special about the others.

NB: the homepage of mingw-w64 used to be on sourceforge but is now at http://mingw-w64.org ; links have been updated accordingly.

Assumptive

Maybe also worth mentioning that there are actually quite a few distributions of MinGW-w64 itself. Your answer put me onto MSYS2 which is worth it alone for having pacman packages on windows. – Kab

Mingw-64 for windows has the worst package manager I've ever encountered. There's literally about 100 packages and you can't turn them all off except by clicking on each one and selecting an option. Pathetic. – Cist

@Cist If you mean a specific distribution, please mention it. MinGW itself has no package manager. – Mesnalty

@Mesnalty Mingw-w64 for windows is the name of the package. – Cist

@Cist That doesn't make any sense. If you just want to write bad about MinGW(-w64), then do it elsewhere. – Mesnalty

No, this is the appropriate venue. – Cist

Have things changed since your post was written? – Bog

I don't think so. – Assumptive

Just to clear something up, I believe Metamorphosis is refering to the "winbuild" distribution, which I agree is a little obtuse. However, you can also get MinGW-w64 as a standalone installer (easy to miss link) or in a linux-like native environment through "MSYS2" which also provides the excellent pacman package manager. – Shouse

Where can one download C Environment based on GCC 71 with 64 Bit and OpenMP support? Something which is pre complied. Thank You. – Bog

Answer 2

For those interested in 32-bit binaries:

Note the code::blocks IDE comes with MinGW, but the compiler is the 32-bit version of TDM-GCC. The TDM version has static runtime linkage by default which makes executables portable to systems without MinGW installed. The TDM-gcc compiler also seems to implement the latest gcc version faster than the other projects.

The MinGW distribution also doesn't use posix emulation to access threads in Windows (unlike MinGW64 or TDM64). There is a separate download source for the headers providing C++11 compliant and functionality for MinGW.

Drunkard