MSYS2 GNU Toolchains

Project

• MSYS2 may refer to:

  • MSYS2 runtime (msys-2.0.dll) available as https://packages.msys2.org/base/msys2-runtime package,

  • either native or cross-compilation aarch64-pc-msys the target MinGW GNU Toolchain consisting of several packages from MSYS2 distribution,

  • or the whole distribution of software depending either on MSYS2 or MinGW runtime in form of MSYS2 packages available athttps://www.msys2.org/.

• This project’s scope is limited to providing both native and cross-compilation (Windows x64 → Windows Arm64) toolchains in form of several MSYS2 packages enabling the community to port all the packages depending on MinGW runtime to aarch64-w64-mingw32 target and all the remaining packages depending on MSYS2 runtime to aarch64-pc-msys target.

• The MSYS2 runtime itself is a friendly fork of Cygwin Runtime differing only by a small set of patches, mostly doing the rebranding and minor environment changes or fixes so it’s out of the scope of this project so refer there for the details.

• The Arm64 porting of MSYS2 toolchains is happening at GitHub - Windows-on-ARM-Experiments/msys2-woarm64-build: Workflows and build scripts for Windows on Arm64 MSYS2 toolchains packages for `aarch64-w64-mingw32` target.

Status

• The Windows x64 host, aarch64-w64-mingw32 target cross-compilation toolchain is already available as set of packages in MSYS2 overlay repository at GitHub - Windows-on-ARM-Experiments/msys2-woarm64-build: Workflows and build scripts for Windows on Arm64 MSYS2 toolchains packages for `aarch64-w64-mingw32` target.

• The Windows Arm64 host aarch64-w64-mingw32 target native toolchain is being finalized and will be available soon from the same MSYS2 packages repository.

• Most of the work with porting the packages forming the native aarch64-pc-msys target toolchain has been already done as well but this work has been paused because of unavailability of the Cygwin Runtime. Once resumed, there will be a necessity to update all the changes already done to align with the upstream changes happening meanwhile.

Next Steps

• Finalizing porting of the native aarch64-w64-mingw32 target toolchain packages.

• Upstreaming of both the cross-compilation and the native aarch64-w64-mingw32 target toolchain packages ports.

• Once Cygwin Runtime will be available, finalizing and upstreaming the aarch64-pc-msys target toolchain packages ports.