MinGW

MinGW (full name - Minimalist GNU for Windows, early name - mingw32) is a native Windows port of the free C and C++ compilers of GCC, which are designed to create different software for the corresponding operating system. Originally MinGW was forked from Cygwin, but the programs it builds do not depend on third-party runtime DLLs. The package includes all the necessary tools to compile and link programs. MinGW can be used absolutely free of charge, without spending money on paid tools or libraries. It includes GCC compilers, a linker, an assembler, an archiver, a set of Windows header files and libraries, as well as MSYS, a set of Unix command-line utilities.

Each utility in MinGW is designed to work from the command line, but this does not prevent their use in popular IDEs (Eclipse, NetBeans, Code::Blocks, Dev-C++), which provide a graphical interface for the GCC compilers. Installing MinGW is quite easy with the mingw-get installer: during the installation process, the selected MinGW packages are automatically downloaded to your computer. The default installation path is "C:\MinGW". The original MinGW project is no longer actively developed; the separate mingw-w64 project offers newer GCC toolchains for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows.

MinGW allows for the production of native Windows applications without having to pay for expensive tools or libraries.