Older versions MinGW to research

[Jonathan Wakely]

On Mon, 10 Dec 2018 at 12:46, David Brown wrote:
>
> On 10/12/18 06:20, Wojciech Balawender wrote:
> >  Hello,
> >
> > I'm writing my master's thesis and I need older versions MinGW to my
> > research - as many binary versions as possible (since GCC 2.95) for
> > Microsoft Windows. I will test the impact of new language constructs on the
> > speed of compiling the source code and size of source code... and many,
> > many other things will be tested. Where can download all versions? ;-)
> >
> > Thanks for the help
> > Regards,
> >
>
> I would say that if you want to test the different versions of the
> compiler itself, you do /not/ want binaries.  A key point is that older
> versions of gcc binaries will be compiled using older versions of gcc -
> and this will cause artificial changes to the compile speed.  You would
> be better getting the source code tarballs for different gcc releases,
> and compile them all using the same version of gcc, with the same basic
> optimisation settings.
>
> And you should do yourself a favour and switch to Linux for this.  It
> will be hugely easier to do, and eliminate many complications and
> additional sources of variation such as the C library (which for MinGW
> was MS's msvccrt DLL, but is different for modern MinGW-64).
>
> If you follow these two steps, then the gcc source releases are all
> conveniently available for download from the gcc website.

On the other hand, you won't find either mingw32 binaries or sources
on the GCC website, because it's a different project. You'd have to
ask mingw where to find their binaries, instead of asking GCC.