What's the difference between the MinGW project and the 32-bit portion of the MinGW-w64 project? Does the 32-bit portion of MinGW-w64 have any relation to x64 at all?
It seems like their compilers do the exact same things...
MinGW-w64 is a improved version which supports both 32bit and 64bit, and some more of the WinAPI (still not all, because thats much work, but more than MinGW). MinGW-w64 only provides their source code, but no binaries to "just use" the compiler.
MinGW can be run either on the native Microsoft Windows platform, cross-hosted on Linux (or other Unix), or "cross-native" on Cygwin. Although programs produced under MinGW are 32-bit executables, they can be used both in 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows.
You can install this software anywhere, but I recommend installing it in the default directory: C:\MinGW. Click Continue. The following pop-up window will appear, showing the downloading progress. After about a minute, it should appear as follows.
MINGW refers to executables that are compiled using the MINGW GCC Compiler and target the Win32 API. MSYS2 refers to executables that are compiled by MSYS2 GCC Compiler and make use of a POSIX emulation layer.
The MinGW from http://www.mingw.org/ does only support gcc 32 bit (host and target). The independent minGW-w64 project provides support for 64 bit, and also supports a much larger part of the Windows API. The MinGW-w64 project however does not provide official binary builds: These can be grabbed either from the personal build directories of the developers (the most popular being rubenvb), or from associated but independent projects like tdm-gcc or mingw-builds or msys2.
Source: http://wiki.qt.io/MinGW-64-bit
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