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Ouch! MinGW is really in a limbo, sticking its fork into the proverbial toaster. Microsoft can change behaviors in MSVCRT.DLL, which can break MinGW programs.

Now I'm even more motivated to stop using MinGW.

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MSVCRT.DLL is what programs compiled with Visual Studio 6.0 link to. So I think it's safe to expect MS retaining compatibility for the forseeable future.

I have heard that it's possible to talk MinGW into linking against MSVCRnnn.DLL instead, with some effort. And then you have to figure out how to ship the redistributable, both physically and legally, but if you can do that, more power to you. Here's a plausible-sounding set of instructions:

http://www.pygame.org/wiki/PreparingMinGW

Say, what about the msvcrt from the Wine project?

http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/tree/HEAD:/dlls/msvcrt

Huh. That's a really interesting idea. I'd be worried about whether it translates to UNIX calls, but it looks like it mostly translates to Win32 calls (that WINE then emulates).

I don't know enough about MinGW to try it, but seems worth a shot!

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