History

A Brief History

Mingw-w64 was started in order to port an ObjectiveC application to 64bit Windows in 2005. The only compiler targeting Windows that supported ObjectiveC was the GCC compiler from MinGW.

OneVision began clean room of the 64bit Windows API. The work was presented to the MinGW developers at mingw.org after the initial port of the GNU toolchain and the headers/startup sources were completed by OneVision?. It was rejected on the suspicion of using non-public proprietary sources of information ( additional infos).

The mingw-w64 project was then created as a fork of the original MinGW project to prevent the work from being lost. It was registered on sourceforge on August 2007, with the public code repository up by October 2007. In 2008, OneVision? donated the mingw-w64 code to Kai Tietz on the condition that it remains Open Source. Kai currently works on maintaining the GNU toolchain to support both 32bit and 64bit Windows.

Policy

One of the founding policies of the mingw-w64 project is that any code change to external tools (GCC, binutils, gdb, ...) must be merged back upstream in order to prevent bit rot often associated with private working trees. This means that the vanilla FSF-released GNU toolchains are often built and used directly without any extra patch.

Mingw-w64 accepts clean room reverse-engineered code, such as those from ReactOS and Wine, in contrast to the original mingw.org project where all contributions must be sourced from the MSDN Library. The difference in policy is a major dividing issue between the two projects and a source of contention as of writing.