First post, by lmemsm
There may be no one interested in this type of thing besides me, but I thought I'd mention it just in case someone else out there does have similar interests. I still use the original MinGW compiler for most of my FOSS builds on Windows. I just got the gcc 6.3.0 32 bit compiler to build from source using the last original MinGW public domain versions of mingwrt and w32api. I'm considering whether to replace the mingwrt completely with a win32 based runtime instead of using msvcrt or ucrt. That would make it more like midipix which only needs nt.dll. I build/port a large number of lightweight FOSS software, so it'll be nice to have more modern C++ support for my builds. I was using the original MinGW 4.7.2 and that became rather limiting. I have builds of nano, htop, calcurse, putty, curl, several SDL 1.x and 2.x programs (including some lightweight games) and several FLTK programs. I'm wondering how far the toolchain and FOSS programs can be modernized but still work on or provide support for older versions of Windows such as Windows XP. Also wondering how well some of the console programs I've built would run on FreeDOS using HX DOS extender. I'm curious how well some of these programs work on older versions of Windows too. It would be nice to help keep some older operating systems working by using more modern FOSS programs built to run on them. Anyone else interested working on similar projects or interested in these types of topics?
