GCC on Windows OS

I was wondering is there a free Windows version of GCC.

I k开发者_JS百科now there is minigw and something else but I don't know how to use them.

Sorry if this should be on SU.

The main choices are either MinGW or CygWin.

CygWin is a more complete UNIX-like environment than MinGW as it offers quite a lot of tools over and above development stuff. Even to the point of a full X-Windows server so you can develop software that'll run on both UNIX-like systems and Windows.

The installer is good but I would suggest installing everything even if you think you don't need it. Disk space is cheap and I've had problems in the past trying to get stuff going on partial installs (whether 1.7, or even earlier, fixes this, I don't know - I always do full installs).

However, it relies on the CygWin UNIX emulation DLL which, if I remember rightly, has restrictions for non-free software.

MinGW is more concentrated on the development tools. It generates native Windows applications rather than running under a emulation DLL like CygWin.

It used to be difficult to install with having to do MinGW, MSYS and others separately but it's come a long since then and has an easy graphical installer.

I believe it can do graphical applications using native Windows calls rather than via X-Windows, since it just links to the normal Windows runtimes.

If you want to know how to use either of them, you really have to look through the docs found at those links I provided - check the Documentation link on the left for MinGW (particularly Getting started) or the CygWin FAQ.

As for GUIs for development, I've never used one for CygWin - I'm old enough that I remember mark sense cards so I'm not scared of the command line interface :-).

I used Eclipse with CDT running over MinGW and wasn't that impressed although admittedly that was an early version. Don't get me wrong Eclipse is a brilliant tool and we use it for both Java and Linux/C development, I just had a lot of troubles with Eclipse/CDT under Windows.

Code::Blocks, on the other hand, was absolutely brilliant but you should check them all out to see which one suits you best. As I said, the last time I looked was about five years ago, an eternity in the IT world.

I am a bit late, but since the question may still arise...

gcc for Windows (including Ada, C, C++ and Fortran compilers) can be obtained from MinGW-builds on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingwbuilds/files/host-windows/releases/

As of august 2013, there are 32 and 64 bits versions of gcc-4.8.1.