Re: Switching from i686-mingw32 to x86_64-w64-mingw32?

On Sun, Aug 16, 2026 at 8:43 PM Zhongteng Gui via Gcc <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi, I'm not sure whether this should be asked here, but I can't find a more
> appropriate list.
>
> I was reading https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-17/criteria.html, and found that
> i686-mingw32 is listed as a secondary platform, while x86_64-w64-mingw32 is not
> listed.
>
> It seemes that i686-mingw32 has been here since gcc-5 (actually the primary
> platform list and secondary platform list only slightly changed from gcc-5 to
> gcc-17). However, i686-mingw32 itself is actually not a valid *triplet*. And
> regarding of i686-w64-mingw32, which it likely actually refers to, MSYS2 (the
> main distribution of GCC on Windows) has deprecated MINGW32 (the only
> environment with i686-w64-mingw32 triplet) since 2023-12-13 [1]. The default
> environment of MSYS2 (previously MINGW64 and now UCRT64) all uses
> x86_64-w64-mingw32.
>
> Considering that i686 devices are very rare compared to x86_64 nowadays, I think
> it would be better to switching from i686-mingw32 to x86_64-w64-mingw32 as a
> secondary platform. Maybe i686-pc-cygwin could also be replaced by x86_64-pc-cygwin.

+1, all x86 platforms should transition to 64-bit.

Same for freebsd, i586-unknown-freebsd -> x86_64-unknown-freebsd
(32-bit x86 unsupported since freebsd 15)