# MinGW

10 Hacker News commenters recommended MinGW and 13 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free GCC toolchain for Windows builds needing no extra runtime DLLs, and binaries that run on many Windows versions. Critics call it fragile and frustrating to use.

## Why people recommend it

- No extra runtime DLLs needed (3 comments): "It's a good compiler that provides an excellent compatibility without the need of any extra runtime DLLs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023928)) "avoids the need for additional runtime" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023548)) "it just uses the ancient msvcrt.dll that is present in all Windows versions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023866))
- Used daily to build and ship (3 comments): "distribute the binaries built with MingW." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47865764)) "I try to build everthing using Mingw.." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023407)) "Now it's my little friend." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47025503))
- Binaries run on many Windows versions (2 comments): "it produces better compatible binaries on Windows, allowing me to support all Windows versions from Windows 2000 to latest" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043466)) "it just uses the ancient msvcrt.dll that is present in all Windows versions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023866))

## What people warn about

- Frustrating and hard to use (5 comments): "using MinGW will make producing a positive outcome significantly harder and more frustrating" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037297)) "Myself I have been struggling with Mingw just to compile from source." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026566)) "it's fewer hoops and hurdles than using MinGW, in my experience" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026829))
- Widely disparaged as garbage (5 comments): "The only reason to use MinGW is because you primarily use Linux and you want to half-ass do the bare minimum." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042158)) "piece of garbage poop I don’t let infect my system" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47027631)) "MingW is evil and no project should ever use it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47025187))
- Libraries incomplete or incompatible (4 comments): "The biggest issue I ran into was MinGW and GCC implement the FileSystem library differently" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46249571)) "a lot of the expected developer tools are just barely functional or don’t exist" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48258148)) "older mingw versions have `wchar.h` with only 2 functions: `wcscmp`, `wcslen`" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45963032))
- Linker and flag bugs (2 comments): "The MinGW invocation is missing the flag for the exception handling model" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803111)) "there's a bug in the linker, which puts uninitialized variables in the data segment instead of bss" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432601))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Fil-C](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fil-c.md): 160 recommend
- [Claude's C Compiler](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-s-c-compiler.md): 39 recommend
- [Visual C++](https://hackerapproved.com/p/visual-c-plus-plus.md): 29 recommend
- [Tiny C Compiler (TCC)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tcc.md): 22 recommend
- [Microsoft Visual C++ compiler (MSVC)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/msvc.md): 20 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "MinGW", https://hackerapproved.com/p/mingw/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).