Difference between MinGW and the regular GCC?

Question

On the SourceForge page for MinGW, you can download the GCC 4.5.2 and that's the latest version. On the GNU mirrors, you can download the GCC 4.6 source and compile it with one of the possible windows targets:

i[3456789]86-w64-mingw*
i[3456789]86-*-mingw*
x86_64-*-mingw*

Is there a difference between using one of these targets and the traditional GCC for MinGW? Would it make sense to use the regular GCC because it has more up-to-date versions or would it make more sense to wait until an up-to-date GCC for MinGW is released?

Answer 1

As you can see in the README file accompanying the MinGW release of GCC on SourceForge, no local patches were used, and I think this has been the case for quite a while now, so assuming there were no changes in the GCC codebase that require new local patches, you can very well download the GCC sources from one of the mirrors and build them yourself.

I have done so myself in the past, especially because I use gfortran, which is under quite heavy development, so from time to time I take the most recent snapshot and build that myself, so I can use certain new features that were only recently introduced.

(I have to admit that it took some trying to get the build to run without errors, and after a period without problems, I recently ran into some new ones that I couldn't completely smooth out. I will have to try again soon.)