I wish open source projects would support MingW or at least not actively blocking it's usage. It's a good compiler that provides an excellent compatibility without the need of any extra runtime DLLs.

I don't understand how open source projects can insist on requiring a proprietary compiler.

There are some pretty useful abstractions and libraries that MinGW doesn't work with. Biggest example is the WIL[1], which Windows kernel programmers use and is a massive improvement in ergonomics and safety when writing native Windows platform code.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/wil

I fail to see why this would not work with gcc if it works with clang. The runtime?

'MinGW' is not GCC; it's an ABI, and from the developer perspective it is also the headers and the libraries. You can have GCC MinGW, Clang MinGW, Rust MinGW, Zig MinGW, C# AOT MinGW.

To answer your question, the headers.

if you want to link msvc built libraries (that are external/you dont have source), mingw may not be an option. for an example you can get steamworks sdk to build with mingw but it will crash at runtime

Agreed I also like to see more support for MingW especially from open source projects. Not even a passing mention in this blog post.

Eww no. MingW is evil and no project should ever use it.

Just use Clang + MSVC STL + WinSDK. Very simple.

From the capitalization I can tell you and the parent might not be aware it's "minimal GNU for Windows" which I would tend to pronounce "min g w" and capitalize as "MinGW." I used to say ming. Now it's my little friend. Say hello to my little friend, mang.

I typically refer to it as “piece of garbage poop I don’t let infect my system”.