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 2 hours 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 2 hours 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