xPack MinGW-w64 GCC v12.4.0-1 released
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 or 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 or 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 development dependency for a project is quite easy:
cd my-project
xpm init # Add a package.json if not already present
xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/mingw-w64-gcc@latest --verbose
ls -l xpacks/.bin
To install this specific version, use:
xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/mingw-w64-gcc@12.4.0-1.1 --verbose
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 created by xpm in the current project:
cd my-project
xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/mingw-w64-gcc
To completely remove the package from the central xPack 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 12.4.0 from 20 Jun 2024;
- binutils version 2.42 from 29 Jan 2024
- MinGW-w64 version 12.0.0
Supported languages
The supported languages are:
- C
- C++
- Fortran
- Obj-C
- Obj-C++
- Fortran
Note: Obj-C/C++ support is minimalistic.
Changes
Compared to the upstream, there are no functional changes.
Bug fixes
- none
Enhancements
- none
Known problems
Please see the separate tests results page.
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.
For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the How to build 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:
92dc52f40f71b9c589911ef5fad41d8cd4eaf4c9f418d720637857a6ec63b183
xpack-mingw-w64-gcc-12.4.0-1-darwin-arm64.tar.gz
05c0788b791a306ece23c94cc98842894ec9a817614d801ef4066f837245105a
xpack-mingw-w64-gcc-12.4.0-1-darwin-x64.tar.gz
57bef67a0d7e6de4b8273430fd07e0d8dc4c763ab8ada0e85f3ea2ff12cdc454
xpack-mingw-w64-gcc-12.4.0-1-linux-arm.tar.gz
d928bbba51af483a86f49e05e6093f86a703e3893d30342f03b66503e294ff43
xpack-mingw-w64-gcc-12.4.0-1-linux-arm64.tar.gz
b74693170932aabd25ea4a97fd848fb5217a4bd06c717a544d1d960b95d1437f
xpack-mingw-w64-gcc-12.4.0-1-linux-x64.tar.gz
3b309011989ad4af4ac2ebd195ad6a516652db2bd71c2683e9acbf2bbb4890dd
xpack-mingw-w64-gcc-12.4.0-1-win32-x64.zip
Deprecation notices
Linux minimum requirements
The minimum requirement is GLIBC 2.27, available starting with Ubuntu 18, Debian 10 and RedHat 8. Support for RedHat 7 was dropped in 2022.
32-bit support
Support for 32-bit Intel Linux and Intel Windows was dropped in 2022.
Pre-deprecation notice for 32-bit Arm Linux
Due to the large user base of 32-bit Raspberry Pi systems, support for 32-bit Arm Linux (armv7l) will be preserved for a little while, but expect it to be dropped by 2025, so it is recommended to consider an upgrade to a RPi 4 or 5 with at least 4 GB (preferably 8 GB) of RAM.
Pre-deprecation notice for Ubuntu 18.04
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver reached the end of the standard five-year maintenance window for Long-Term Support (LTS) release on 31 May 2023.
As a courtesy, the xPack GNU/Linux releases will continue to be based on Ubuntu 18.04 for another year.
From 2025 onwards, the GNU/Linux binaries will be built on Debian 10, (GLIBC 2.28), and are also expected to run on RedHat 8.
Users are urged to update their build and test infrastructure to ensure a smooth transition to the next xPack releases.
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