Question: is mingw a good compiler?
Answer: I have found the MinGW-w64 compilers very good, and GCC 4.6 and above (actually, 4.5. 1 and above) are very capable of producing good 64-bit code for Windows. Please remember that MinGW provides essentially the same C API as msvcrt. ... A commonly encountered error when porting *nix or x86 Windows code to x64 Windows.