Deploying Qt with MinGW requires VC++ redistributable?

Question

I'm testing an application using Qt 4.7.3 compiled with MinGW on a clean XP virtual box. The application wasn't working and after much grief, I traced the error to needing to download the Visual C++ 2005 redistributable. I downloaded this and it worked. Something doesn't seem right here, shouldn't I not need any VC++ libraries since I'm using MinGW? Could it be a problem with my compilation? I should mention that I'm not using qmake to build.

Answer 1

The dependency on MSVCRT.DLL is due to MinGW itself. To quote mingw.org..

MinGW provides a complete Open Source programming tool set which is suitable for the development of native MS-Windows applications, and which do not depend on any 3rd-party C-Runtime DLLs. (It does depend on a number of DLLs provided by Microsoft themselves, as components of the operating system; most notable among these is MSVCRT.DLL, the Microsoft C runtime library.

Also see: Should I redistribute msvcrt.dll with my application?

Answer 2

As noted in the Qt documentation, yes, that is required:

http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/windows-deployment.html