[Mingw-users] What's the relationship between GCC and MinGW

[Xiaobo Gu <gux...@gm...>]

Hi,
  I am new to GCC and MinGW, these days I am trying to build the 64bit
PostgreSQL for Windows platform. People suggest using the popular
MinGW toolchain, and because PostgresQL source code is only compatible
with only a few versions of GCC, so I must using the only 4.5.0 and
3.4.4 versions, these got me more confused, I think I won't get the
work done before I clearly understand GCC MinGW and MSYS. There are my
questions:

1. MinGW provides header, lib and dll runtime files to build Windows
applications, GCC is just a compiler(just for C), what's the
relationship between them? Does GCC must use the header/lib/dll files
provided by MinGW.
2. Do they must be used togather, and with the same version?

3. Where can I download the 4.5.0 or 3.4.4 64bit versions of them.

4. I installed TDM's GCC for Win64, but there are same files in the
bin and x86_64-w64-mingw32\bin directory, such as ar.exe, as.exe etc,
are they same, what's the difference between them if not.


Many thanks.


Xiaobo Gu