3

I have an MSYS installation on my Windows machine.

Inside the root folder, there are two executables:

  • msys2.exe
  • mingw64.exe

(There is also a mingw32.exe but that is just the 32-bit version of mingw64, I believe).

Both executables launch a terminal window, that seem identical to me, apart from the fact that $PATH reports slight differences.

What is the difference between these two, and what is the purpose of each?

mydoghasworms
  • 792
  • 2
  • 6
  • 18
  • IIRC, packages in the msys2 repo relies on `msys-runtime`, which is a `POSIX emulation engine` (a bit like a libc but in the form of a translation layer, I think) forked from Cygwin, to work, while MINGW packages are more or less compiled as native Windows programs / libraries. – Tom Yan May 12 '21 at 12:04

0 Answers0