Excerpt from http://www.mingw.org/wiki/FAQ: What’s the difference between make and mingw32-make? The “native” (i.e.: MSVCRT dependent) port of make is lacking in some functionality and has modified functionality due to the lack of POSIX on Win32. There also exists a version of make in the MSYS distribution that is dependent on the MSYS runtime. This port operates … Read more
GCC is a big bag of software. The typical process, as I understand it, is for a GCC frontend to lex and parse the code, convert to GCC’s internal Register Transfer Language (RTL), and then for a backend to write out native code. So one typical flow is: C code —> GCC’s C frontend —> … Read more
A compiled language is one where the program, once compiled, is expressed in the instructions of the target machine. For example, an addition “+” operation in your source code could be translated directly to the “ADD” instruction in machine code. An interpreted language is one where the instructions are not directly executed by the target … Read more
You can use GCC on Windows by downloading MingW (discontinued) or its successor Mingw-w64.