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msys2

MSYS2: What's the difference between UCRT 64 and x64?

My MSYS installation has a few Mingw shells:

  • MINGW32
  • MINGW64
  • MINGW UCRT 64-Bit

What is the difference between the regular MINGW64 shell and the UCRT64 shell?

Solution

  • Please take a look at the following guide: https://www.msys2.org/docs/environments/

    The default MINGW32 and MINGW64 environments build binaries using the older MSVCRT library that should be present on all Windows systems.

    The MINGW UCRT environments build binaries using the newer UCRT library that is only known to be present on Windows 10. It should produce binaries more compatible with MSVC-compiled binaries, but not with the MSVCRT environment.