Mingw-w64 MSVCRT for Alpine Linux

This repository contains some scripts and utilities for getting the Mingw-w64 GCC cross compiler working on Alpine Linux, using MSVCRT as the default C runtime.

Background

As of version , Mingw-w64 uses the Universal C Runtime (UCRT) by default when compiling new programs¹, which is available natively on Windows 10 and later². In order to build new programs with Mingw-w64 that can be used with older versions of Windows without having to install additional dependencies, one must create a custom build of the cross compiler with the --with-default-msvcrt=msvcrt configure option.

The Mingw-w64 packages provided in the Alpine Linux official repositories doesn't explicitly define the MSVCRT option while configuring the package, so UCRT is used by default. This repository contains patches to create MSVCRT variants of these packages for Alpine Linux, as well as prebuilt binaries that can be used manually or on CI/CD workflows.

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1. https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw-w64/mingw-w64/ci/master/tree/mingw-w64-doc/howto-build/ucrt-vs-msvcrt.txt ↩︎

2. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/porting/upgrade-your-code-to-the-universal-crt?view=msvc-170 ↩︎