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MinGW, a contraction of "Minimalist GNU for Windows", is a minimalist development environment for native Microsoft Windows applications.

MinGW includes:

• A port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), including C, C++, ADA and Fortran compilers;
• GNU Binutils for Windows (linker, archive manager)
• MSYS, a fork of Cygwin designed for running configure scripts and Makefiles
• Community-supported add-on tools and libraries (mingwPORTs)
• A graphical and a command-line installer for Windows
• Cross-compilers to build Windows applications on other platforms (e.g. Linux)

MSYS, a contraction of "Minimal SYStem", is a Bourne Shell command line interpreter system. Offered as an alternative to Microsoft's cmd.exe, this provides a general purpose command line environment, which is particularly suited to use with MinGW, for porting of many Open Source applications to the MS-Windows platform; it includes a small selection of Unix tools, chosen to facilitate that objective, and using it is a necessary prerequisite for building mingwPORTs.

mingwPORTs are user contributed additions to the MinGW software collection. Rather than providing these "add-ons" as precompiled binary packages, they are supplied in the form of interactive Bourne shell scripts, which guide the end user through the process of automatically downloading and patching original source code, then building and installing it. Users who wish to build any application from a mingwPORT must first install both MinGW and MSYS.