mingw: delete support for legacy mingw.org toolchain by vszakats · Pull Request #11625 · curl/curl

vszakats · 2023-08-08T11:22:09Z

Drop support for "old" / "legacy" / "classic" / "v1" / "mingw32" MinGW:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinGW, https://osdn.net/projects/mingw/
Its homepage used to be http://mingw.org/ [no HTTPS], and broken now.
It supported the x86 CPU only and used a old Windows API header and
implib set, often causing issues. It also misses most modern Windows
features, offering old versions of both binutils and gcc (no llvm/clang
support). It was last updated 2 years ago.

curl now relies on toolchains based on the mingw-w64 project:
https://www.mingw-w64.org/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/
https://www.msys2.org/ https://github.com/msys2/msys2
https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw
(Also available via Linux and macOS package managers.)

Closes #11625

vszakats · 2023-08-08T11:23:04Z

I may have missed some bits, feel free to update, or report.

Also, I'm uncertain if we announced this for 8.3.0 (released in September), or after 8.3.0. If the latter, feel free to flag it "next-feature-window".

bagder · 2023-08-08T11:30:53Z

The checks for __MINGW32__ that we have in the code, is that define set by any other versions than mingw v1? If so, we could remove all those.

The predef details seems to suggest that's only set by v1?

bagder · 2023-08-08T11:32:26Z

I think we have said we will remove this in September, so it misses the August feature window.

vszakats · 2023-08-08T13:14:11Z

__MINGW32__ should cover both old and new mingws, and mingw-w64 definitely keeps defining it. We also use __MINGW64_VERSION_MAJOR when we specifically look for mingw-w64, vs. the old one. Now that we don't have the old one, I think we are safe to fall back to __MINGW32__ for these cases.

Either way, good idea to check these. I'll review them.

vszakats · 2023-08-08T15:34:40Z

This KNOWN_BUG might need a re-evaluation: #3125

jay · 2023-08-10T21:51:12Z

note __MINGW64_VERSION_MAJOR is not a compiler predefine, it is defined by _mingw.h so if we have to evaluate it in the future then we'll need that include

vszakats · 2023-08-10T22:08:52Z

I'm aware. This patch deletes all uses of __MINGW64_VERSION_MAJOR. We can reinstate _mingw.h once we need to check for a specific mingw-w64 version. This is fairly rarely needed in my experience. We might also leave it there to mark its position and disable it with #if 0, but I'd avoid including headers we don't actually use.

jay · 2023-08-11T17:08:03Z

I just landed #10056 which has a legacy mingw workaround so when you rebase on master you'll want to remove these lines:
889c071#diff-ee813638cd7ec84110df50039b34c74fab8c79ef2b916858fdb6f19f5121a6abR63-R97

vszakats · 2023-08-11T19:43:51Z

Thanks @jay, it's done now.

vszakats · 2023-08-15T11:18:37Z

I deleted a list of compatibility constants, that were not marked "old mingw"-specific in the source.

Part of them had this information in the commit message of 3d3a3f9. With the rest I took a chance and assumed that if those constants were already defined by mingw-w64 1.0 (2011-09-26), they were also present in the official SDK released with supported MSVC versions (2010 and later).

curl also seems to support Pelles C. I have no idea about what's available there and CI doesn't test it. AFAIR Pelles C used to have fairly decent Windows headers. Tried to download it but even binaries are only offered via cleartext HTTP and even that was a 404. The compiler feels abandoned. We can restore any necessary compatibility macro as we go.

Also, there may be more compatibility macros that were added for old-mingw, but not marked as such.

We might also exclude such updates from this PR if this feels risky.

Drop support for "old" / "legacy" / "classic" MinGW or "mingw32": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinGW, https://osdn.net/projects/mingw/ Its homepage used to be http://mingw.org/ [no HTTPS], and broken now. It supported the x86 CPU only and used a old Windows API header and implib set, often causing issues. It also misses most modern Windows features, offering old versions of both binutils and gcc (no llvm/clang support). It was last updated 2 years ago. curl now relies on toolchains based on the mingw-w64 project: https://www.mingw-w64.org/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/ https://www.msys2.org/ https://github.com/msys2/msys2 https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw Also available via Linux and macOS package managers. Closes curl#11625

cegcc uses the headers from "old-mingw" and thus suffer from some of the same limitations. Restore some code deleted when dropping old-mingw. Adapt the rest to build with wince. Certificate verification always fails with cegcc due the limitations. Drop a pre-existing wince #error and let the build finish anyway. Ref: 3802910 curl#11625

Follow-up to 3802910 curl#11625 Closes curl#15087

curl no longer supports old mingw. Follow-up to 3802910 curl#11625 Follow-up to 856b133 curl#9412

curl no longer supports old/legacy/classic mingw. This mitigation was addressing slow perf seen in CI with old mingw. The slow perf is not seen in current CI with supported compilers. Remove the duplicate DLL load function from libtest. It's no longer used after this patch. Current CI run times for test3026 on GHA/windows: ``` test 3026...[curl_global_init thread-safety] # mingw, CM clang-x86_64 gnutls libssh -------e--- OK (1715 out of 1738, remaining: 00:02, took 0.196s, duration: 02:55) # dl-mingw, CM 9.5.0-x86_64 schannel -------e--- OK (1554 out of 1577, remaining: 00:02, took 0.217s, duration: 02:29) # msvc, CM x64-windows schannel +examples -------e--- OK (1578 out of 1601, remaining: 00:02, took 0.205s, duration: 02:50) ``` Follow-up to 3802910 #11625 Follow-up to 856b133 #9412 Ref: #17413 Closes #17414

mingw-w64 always defines `CERT_CHAIN_REVOCATION_CHECK_CHAIN`. Also confirmed in CI. Follow-up to 3802910 #11625 Ref: a28f5f6 #18010 Closes #18084

Replace `_beginthreadex()` C runtime calls with native win32 API `CreateThread()`. The latter was already used in `src/tool_doswin.c` and in UWP and Windows CE builds before this patch. After this patch all Windows flavors use it. To drop PP logic and simplify code. While working on this it turned out that `src/tool_doswin.c` calls `TerminateThread()`, which isn't recommended by the documentation, except for "the most extreme cases". This patch makes no attempt to change that code. Ref: 9a26633 #17572 Ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/win32/api/processthreadsapi/nf-processthreadsapi-terminatethread Also: - use `WaitForSingleObjectEx()` on all desktop Windows. Ref: 4be80d5 Ref: https://sourceforge.net/p/curl/feature-requests/82/ Ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/win32/api/synchapi/nf-synchapi-waitforsingleobjectex - tests: drop redundant casts. - lib3207: fix to not rely on thread macros when building without thread support. Assisted-by: Jay Satiro Assisted-by: Marcel Raad Assisted-by: Michał Petryka Follow-up to 3802910 #11625 Closes #18451

github-actions bot added the CI Continuous Integration label Aug 8, 2023

vszakats added build Windows Windows-specific labels Aug 8, 2023

vszakats changed the title ~~mingw: delete support for old/classic/legacy toolchain version~~ mingw: delete support for old/classic/legacy toolchain edition Aug 8, 2023

vszakats changed the title ~~mingw: delete support for old/classic/legacy toolchain edition~~ mingw: delete support for old/classic/legacy toolchain version Aug 8, 2023

bagder added the feature-window A merge of this requires an open feature window label Aug 8, 2023

github-actions bot added the tests label Aug 8, 2023

vszakats force-pushed the del-old-mingw branch from e9f5043 to 139414a Compare August 8, 2023 14:38

vszakats changed the title ~~mingw: delete support for old/classic/legacy toolchain version~~ mingw: delete support for legacy mingw.org toolchain Aug 9, 2023

vszakats force-pushed the del-old-mingw branch 2 times, most recently from 139414a to 5bac934 Compare August 10, 2023 15:27

vszakats force-pushed the del-old-mingw branch 2 times, most recently from 1b7f309 to b7a50f6 Compare August 11, 2023 19:42

vszakats force-pushed the del-old-mingw branch 2 times, most recently from a00680b to 20940b1 Compare August 21, 2023 21:11

vszakats force-pushed the del-old-mingw branch from 20940b1 to 0f416a5 Compare August 31, 2023 23:34

vszakats removed the feature-window A merge of this requires an open feature window label Sep 21, 2023

vszakats added 2 commits September 21, 2023 13:05

delete one more reference

f25a5fc

pps83 pushed a commit to pps83/curl that referenced this pull request Apr 26, 2025

runtests: drop unused code for old/classic-mingw support

d1f3734

Follow-up to 3802910 curl#11625 Closes curl#15087

vszakats added a commit to vszakats/curl that referenced this pull request May 22, 2025

lib3026: stop pre-loading DLLs to mitigate old mingw perf issue

004445e

curl no longer supports old mingw. Follow-up to 3802910 curl#11625 Follow-up to 856b133 curl#9412

vszakats mentioned this pull request May 22, 2025

lib3026: drop DLL pre-load perf mitigation for old mingw #17414

Closed

vszakats mentioned this pull request Jul 29, 2025

schannel: drop old-mingw special case #18084

Closed

vszakats added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 29, 2025

schannel: drop old-mingw special case

952c929

mingw-w64 always defines `CERT_CHAIN_REVOCATION_CHECK_CHAIN`. Also confirmed in CI. Follow-up to 3802910 #11625 Ref: a28f5f6 #18010 Closes #18084

vszakats mentioned this pull request Sep 4, 2025

windows: replace _beginthreadex() with CreateThread() #18451

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mingw: delete support for legacy mingw.org toolchain#11625

mingw: delete support for legacy mingw.org toolchain#11625
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