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MinGW is a free and open source Windows port of the GCC compiler and related tools. Qt supports MinGW as a platform on Windows (in addition to the Visual Studio compiler by Microsoft). However, it can also be used as a cross-compiler e.g. on Unix (currently not officially supported).

Qt Creator supports compiling with a MinGW toolchain out of the box.

MinGW distributions and versions

There are actually different MinGW toolchains and packages available:

  • MinGW is the original project. It only compiles for 32-bit binaries.
  • MinGW-w64 is a fork with the original which also supports generation of 64-bit binaries. By now it also supports a much larger part of the Win32 API. The MinGW-w64 project does host several different binary packages, done by different people.

There are binary installers targeting MinGW for both Qt 4 and Qt 5. Up to Qt 4.8.6, Qt 4 ones are built with a MinGW toolchain using GCC 4.4. Newer Qt 4.8 binary packages ship with a MinGW-w64 based toolchain. For Qt 5, original MinGW toolchains are no longer supported.

Toolchains used in Qt binary packages

Qt version MinGW toolchain
Qt 4.8.6, Qt 4.8.7 mingw-builds i686-4.8.2-release-posix-dwarf-rt_v3-rev3
Qt 5.0 mingw-builds x32-4.7.2-release-posix-sjlj-rev8
Qt 5.1 mingw-builds x32-4.8.0-release-posix-dwarf-rev2
Qt 5.2, Qt 5.3 mingw-builds i686-4.8.2-release-posix-dwarf-rt_v3-rev3
Qt 5.4 mingw-builds i686-4.9.1-release-posix-dwarf-rt_v3-rev2
Qt 5.5, Qt 5.6 mingw-builds i686-4.9.2-release-posix-dwarf-rt_v3-rev1
Qt 5.7, Qt 5.9, Qt 5.10, Qt 5.11 mingw-builds i686-5.3.0-release-posix-dwarf-rt_v4-rev0
Qt 5.12, Qt 5.13, Qt 5.14 mingw-builds i686-7.3.0-release-posix-dwarf-rt_v5-rev0, mingw-builds x86_64-7.3.0-release-posix-seh-rt_v5-rev0
Qt 5.15 mingw-builds i686-8.1.0-release-posix-dwarf-rt_v6-rev0, mingw-builds x86_64-8.1.0-release-posix-seh-rt_v6-rev0
Qt 6.0, Qt 6.1, Qt 6.2.0, Qt 6.2.1 mingw-builds x86_64-8.1.0-release-posix-seh-rt_v6-rev0
Qt 6.2.2, 6.2.3, 6.2.4 mingw-builds x86_64-11.2.0-release-posix-seh-rt_v9-rev1
Qt 6.3.0 -> mingw-builds x86_64-11.2.0-release-posix-seh-rt_v9-rev3
Qt 6.8.0 -> mingw-builds 13.1.0-202407240918mingw1310

Common problems

Link error 'Undefined reference to _Unwind_Resume'

This error occurs if object files / libraries being linked are compiled with different versions of mingw. The following steps can fix a problem:

  1. Execute
    mingw32-make distclean
    
    in order to remove all object files that was compiled with different mings versions.
  2. Explicitly set library path by setting
    LIBRARY_PATH
    
    environment variable, for example
    set LIBRARY_PATH=c:\mingw\lib
    
    . gcc linker have a very complicated library search algorithm[1] that can result in wrong library being linked (for example, mingw can find installation of strawberry perl in PATH and use it's library).

See also