MinGW, or the Minimalist GNU for Windows prject, is collection of freely available and freely distributable Windows specific header files and import libraries combined with GNU toolsets that allow one to produce native Windows programs that do not rely on any 3rd-party C runtime DLL. It imports libraries and header files for use with GCC to build native Windows applications. It also includes added extensions to the MSVC runtime to support C99 functionality.

Doug Schaefer says Daniel Smith, one of the project administrators on the team, has now ported gcc-4 to the MinGW platform. The salient feature in this version, says Doug, is that "a new optimization framework which promises to be able to generate faster code even accross functions." The port now supports OpenMP, a standard API and language extensions to support parallel programming. There is also support for Objective-C++ -- the CDT team too has received numerous requests to support this.