MinGW (Minimalist GNU for Windows), formerly mingw32, is a free and open source software development environment for creating Microsoft Windows applications.It includes a port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GNU Binutils for Windows (assembler, linker, archive manager), a set of freely distributable Windows specific header files and static import libraries which enable the use of the Windows API, a Windows native build of the GNU Project's GNU Debugger, and miscellaneous utilities.MinGW does not rely on third-party C runtime dynamic-link library (DLL) files, and because the runtime libraries are not distributed using the GNU General Public License (GPL), it is not necessary to distribute the source code with the programs produced, unless a GPL library is used elsewhere in the program.MinGW can be run either on the native Microsoft Windows platform, cross-hosted on GNU/Linux, or "cross-native" on Cygwin.An alternative called MinGW-w64 was created by a different author to include several new APIs and provide 64-bit support and is described later in this article.