Aren’t you thinking of Cygwin, or the MSYS2 shell (dev tooling)?

The Windows-native software you build with MSYS2 can be shipped to and run by users that don’t have anything of MSYS2 installed.

▲ reactordev 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

He must be thinking of Cygwin as half of this is installed when you install git ;) Git Bash, etc…

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okanat an hour ago | parent [-]

MSYS2 is repacked Cygwin though. It is literally the same codebase compiled with slightly different flags. You need a full Unix environment for Bash to run, not just Mingw toolchain. The difference is Cygwin aims to create a full Unix system while MSYS2 just enough development environment to run bash, make etc to build native Windows programs with Mingw.

Git installs its own Mingw and Msys2 stuff but mostly compiled for a Mingw environment so they consume Windows paths natively instead of using MSYS2/Cygwin path conversion. That's why when you have mixed PATH variable all hell breaks loose with Git.

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delta_p_delta_x an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> MSYS2 just enough development environment

Doesn't it come with `pacman` too?

	▲	michaelsbradley an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, it’s wonderful.

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michaelsbradley an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I think you’re underestimating or discounting the work the MSYS2 team put into their layered environments mechanism:

https://www.msys2.org/docs/environments/

▲ delta_p_delta_x an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It was not clear what the parent commenter was addressing; I was under the impression they meant 'compile against the MSYS2 environment', which is broadly Cygwin, yes, which should not be forced onto a user.

▲ michaelsbradley an hour ago | parent [-]

Okay, but that just seems to be perpetuating the misunderstanding of what MSYS2 is intended for.

It gives you a *nix-like shell/dev environment and tools, but you build native software that runs on Windows systems that don’t have or need to have all/parts of MSYS2/Cygwin installed.

▲ michaelsbradley an hour ago | parent [-]

Example:

I built a network daemon using the MSYS2 CLANG64 environment and llvm toolchain on Windows 10.

Windows 7 x64 users could download the compiled single-file executable and run it just fine, so long as they installed Microsoft’s Universal C Runtime, which is a free download from Microsoft’s website.

▲ delta_p_delta_x 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

> MSYS2 CLANG64

I get your point. Although my point is that there is actually zero need for MSYS at all for this, even as a developer, and especially not with the 'CLANG64' environment. These binaries themselves are built to run in the MSYS2 environment This is how I cross-compile from Windows... to Windows with LLVM-MinGW[1]:

  > (gci Env:PATH).Value.Split(';') | sort
  > clang-21.exe --version
  clang version 21.1.2 (https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project.git b708aea0bc7127adf4ec643660699c8bcdde1273)
  Target: x86_64-w64-windows-gnu
  Thread model: posix
  InstalledDir: C:/Users/dpdx/AppData/Local/Microsoft/WinGet/Packages/MartinStorsjo.LLVM-MinGW.UCRT_Microsoft.Winget.Source_8wekyb3d8bbwe/llvm-mingw-20250924-ucrt-x86_64/bin
  Configuration file: C:/Users/dpdx/AppData/Local/Microsoft/WinGet/Packages/MartinStorsjo.LLVM-MinGW.UCRT_Microsoft.Winget.Source_8wekyb3d8bbwe/llvm-mingw-20250924-ucrt-x86_64/bin/x86_64-w64-windows-gnu.cfg

[1]: https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw