MinGW-w32 vs. MinGW

Question

What\'s the difference between the MinGW project and the 32-bit portion of the MinGW-w64 project? Does the 32-bit portion of MinGW-w64 have any relation to x64 at all?

Answer 1

There's a bit of insight into this in the Wikipedia talk page on the MinGW article. Basically, it appears that the MinGW-w64 project is a fork of the MinGW source base. I have found very little clear information on the details of why the fork happened (although this mailing-list post and this rebuttalimplies it was some form of the usual sort of open-source politics), or of the subsequent differences between the two projects.

To a first approximation, they're the same; the differences will come in in subsequent development.