Version 11.3.0-1 is the first release.

The xPack MinGW-w64 GCC is a standalone cross-platform binary distribution of Mingw-w64 GCC.

There are separate binaries for Windows (Intel 64-bit), macOS (Intel 64-bit, Apple Silicon 64-bit) and GNU/Linux (Intel 64-bit, Arm 32/64-bit).

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Prerequisites

  • GNU/Linux Intel 64-bit: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • GNU/Linux Arm 32/64-bit: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • Intel Windows 64-bit: Windows 7 with the Universal C Runtime (UCRT), Windows 8, Windows 10
  • Intel macOS 64-bit: 10.13 or later
  • Apple Silicon macOS 64-bit: 11.6 or later

Install

The full details of installing the xPack MinGW-w64 GCC on various platforms are presented in the separate Install page.

Easy install

The easiest way to install GCC is with xpm by using the binary xPack, available as @xpack-dev-tools/mingw-w64-gcc from the npmjs.com registry.

With the xpm tool available, installing the latest version of the package and adding it as a dependency for a project is quite easy:

cd my-project
xpm init # Only at first use.

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/mingw-w64-gcc@latest

ls -l xpacks/.bin

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/mingw-w64-gcc@11.3.0-1.3

It is also possible to install Meson Build globally, in the user home folder, but this requires xPack aware tools to automatically identify them and manage paths.

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/mingw-w64-gcc@latest --verbose

Uninstall

To remove the links from the current project:

cd my-project

xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/mingw-w64-gcc

To completely remove the package from the central xPacks store:

xpm uninstall --global @xpack-dev-tools/mingw-w64-gcc

Compliance

The xPack MinGW-w64 GCC generally follows the official GCC releases.

The current version is based on:

  • GCC version 11.3.0 from Aug 19, 2022;
  • binutils version 2.38 from Feb 9, 2022
  • MinGW-w64 version 9.0.0

Supported languages

The supported languages are:

  • C
  • C++
  • Fortran
  • Obj-C
  • Obj-C++

Note: Obj-C/C++ support is minimalistic.

Changes

Compared to the upstream, there are no functional changes.

Bug fixes

  • none

Enhancements

  • none

Known problems

  • none

Shared libraries

On all platforms the packages are standalone, and expect only the standard runtime to be present on the host.

All dependencies that are build as shared libraries are copied locally in the libexec folder (or in the same folder as the executable for Windows).

-static-libgcc -static-libstdc++

To avoid issues with DLLs, specific when using toolchains installed in custom locations, it is highly recommended to use only the static versions of the GCC libraries.

For C programs, append -static-libgcc to the linker line.

For C++ programs, since the toolchain is configured to use POSIX threads, instead of -static-libstdc++, use the more explicit variant -Wl,-Bstatic,-lstdc++,-lpthread,-Bdynamic when invoking the linker.

DT_RPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH

On GNU/Linux the binaries are adjusted to use a relative path:

$ readelf -d library.so | grep runpath
 0x000000000000001d (RPATH)            Library rpath: [$ORIGIN]

In the GNU ld.so search strategy, the DT_RPATH has the highest priority, higher than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, so if this later one is set in the environment, it should not interfere with the xPack binaries.

Please note that previous versions, up to mid-2020, used DT_RUNPATH, which has a priority lower than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and does not tolerate setting it in the environment.

@rpath and @loader_path

Similarly, on macOS, the binaries are adjusted with install_name_tool to use a relative path.

Documentation

To save space and bandwidth, the original GNU GCC documentation is available online.

Build

The binaries for all supported platforms (Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux) were built using the xPack Build Box (XBB), a set of build environments based on slightly older distributions, that should be compatible with most recent systems.

The scripts used to build this distribution are in:

  • distro-info/scripts

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the README-MAINTAINER page.

CI tests

Before publishing, a set of simple tests were performed on an exhaustive set of platforms. The results are available from:

Tests

The binaries were tested on a variety of platforms, but mainly to check the integrity of the build, not the compiler functionality.

Checksums

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

cc2f9cc866fdb52667b6ef8fdf94c268483c19c3810e446ebde17b30d58cdf6e
xpack-mingw-w64-gcc-11.3.0-1-darwin-arm64.tar.gz

d2a0ea0079366330ed8202793a077d5e27aa58d6ebd985b4221f7027f5493ce5
xpack-mingw-w64-gcc-11.3.0-1-darwin-x64.tar.gz

666d49555bc66dbbcc359463fccf0a144bb505895726c5121b76693f5b124335
xpack-mingw-w64-gcc-11.3.0-1-linux-arm.tar.gz

532e9fc75808badd373c28981f1775c7ee32054251cb92c4f3291b9eecc1462a
xpack-mingw-w64-gcc-11.3.0-1-linux-arm64.tar.gz

133b37b848d1e00a51c4117126e9d56ed12ca1da97c00d075d0db9796bfe61d8
xpack-mingw-w64-gcc-11.3.0-1-linux-x64.tar.gz

2ff8e6d82a6de1a260403f6cc93bff9a5b99c036edbbc20839f913fc6c51a815
xpack-mingw-w64-gcc-11.3.0-1-win32-x64.zip

Deprecation notices

32-bit support

Support for 32-bit Intel Linux and Intel Windows was dropped in 2022. Support for 32-bit Arm Linux (armv7l) will be preserved for a while, due to the large user base of 32-bit Raspberry Pi systems.

Linux minimum requirements

Support for RedHat 7 was dropped in 2022 and the minimum requirement was raised to GLIBC 2.27, available starting with Ubuntu 18, Debian 10 and RedHat 8.

Download analytics

Credit to Shields IO for the badges and to Somsubhra/github-release-stats for the individual file counters.