Any plan to migrate to MSYS2 UCRT64?

Development
1

March 2026 MSYS2 announced the deprecation of MINGW64.

Rack uses MINGW64 as the reference environment for the Windows builds, at least inside docs and the open source code. For example the following lines from the main Rack makefile explicitly reference three msvcrt libraries:

cp /mingw64/bin/libwinpthread-1.dll dist/"$(DIST_DIR)"/
cp /mingw64/bin/libstdc++-6.dll dist/"$(DIST_DIR)"/`
cp /mingw64/bin/libgcc_s_seh-1.dll dist/"$(DIST_DIR)"/

I’m planning to test a build with the UCRT64 environment but, before I start digging into nasty issues that I expect to find along the way, I wanted to know if there’s already any ongoing work on this topic.

2

You probably should send this question to VCV support.

3

@DaveVenom are you sure Support is meant for this kind of questions? I though it was about issues with Rack, things not working, etc. Anyway, I’ve written. Let’s see.

4

Well it is an issue for Rack in the future, so VCV is probably thinking about it, if not actively working on, an alternative to MINGW64. I think it would be good to hear their perspective and plans, and they do not closely monitor the forum, so a direct inquiry in addition to your post makes a lot of sense.

5

Thanks for raising this. I will look into it for the Rack Plugin Toolchain.

6

Of particular interest is the performance aspect of this.

I think UCRT64 might link some better math functions than what it is calling now in the environment. Could save developers some time in optimization.