What is the difference between Orwell's MinGW and TDM Dev-C++ versions?

Question

I am a newbie at this and yesterday I installed Win 8.1 x64 so I would like to use the most suitable program for making my tasks in C/C++. Thanks

Answer 1

MinGW supports only 32 bit binaries, TDM supports 32 and 64 bit binaries (with usage of MinGW's API's).

• If you need a good GCC for Windows, with the drawback of 32 bit only, use MinGW.
• If you want to build 64 bit binaries too, you can use TDM.

Both released GCC 4.8 approximately at the same time, so there's no real difference in up-to-dateness.

My recommendation: Use the 3rd alternative: MinGW-w64 instead - it's a extended MinGW with support for 64 Bit. See here for a short description of MinGW-w64.

Whatever choice you make, better use official developers website for downloading (not Orwell's) to get most up-to-date version.

• MinGW
• MinGW-w64
• TDM-GCC

Btw., you'll find a good overview there, what makes one special about the others.

NB: the homepage of mingw-w64 used to be on sourceforge but is now at http://mingw-w64.org ; links have been updated accordingly.

Answer 2

For those interested in 32-bit binaries:

Note the code::blocks IDE comes with MinGW, but the compiler is the 32-bit version of TDM-GCC. The TDM version has static runtime linkage by default which makes executables portable to systems without MinGW installed. The TDM-gcc compiler also seems to implement the latest gcc version faster than the other projects.

The MinGW distribution also doesn't use posix emulation to access threads in Windows (unlike MinGW64 or TDM64). There is a separate download source for the headers providing C++11 compliant and functionality for MinGW.