[Axiom-developer] [MinGW] (new)

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What is MinGW?

  MinGW ("Minimalistic GNU for Windows") refers to a set of runtime headers, 
used in building a compiler system based on the GNU GCC and binutils projects. 
It compiles and links code to be run on Win32 platforms... providing C, C++ and 
Fortran compilers plus other related tools. If you see references to "mingw32" 
instead of "MinGW", they are referring to the same compiler system. The 
project's name changed from mingw32 to MinGW is to prevent the implication that 
MinGW will only works on 32 bit systems (as 64 and higher bit machines become 
more common, MinGW will evolve to work with them). MinGW uses the Microsoft 
runtime libraries, distributed with the Windows operating system. Unlike other 
ports of GCC to Windows, the runtime libraries are not distributed using Gnu's 
General Public License (GPL). You, therefore, do not have to distribute your 
source code with your programs unless, of course, you use a GPL library in your 
programs.

What is MSYS?

  MSYS or Minimal SYStem is a POSIX and Bourne shell environment use with 
MinGW. It provides a hand picked set of tools to allow a typical configuration 
script with Bourne syntax to execute. This allows most of the GNU packages to 
create a Makefile just from executing the typical configure script which can 
then be used to build the package using the native MinGW version of GCC.

The POSIX layer used by MSYS is a fork of the 1.3.3 version of Cygwin . Cygwin 
is a full POSIX layer and UNIX-like environment for Win32 providing both server 
and client utilites.

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