MinGW is an effort to port GNU tools, including particularly the gcc compiler suite, to run natively in Windows. There's a lot of history but to get the point, when you see a download like x86_64-13.2.0-release-win32-seh-msvcrt-rt_v11-rev1.7z … the various parts of the name indicate: x86_64 = 64 bit. That's what you want. In contrast, just x86 or i686 means 32-bit. 13.3.0 = version number. I believe that as of this writing that's the latest 'n greatest. release, well who knows. Might mean that this is an official release. Or might be in contrast to a "debug" version. win32 = it's for Windows, yay! Including 64-bit Windows. The super-misleading "32" is Microsoft's fault. seh = uses Windows' Structured Exception Handling to implement C++ try-throw-catch. msvcrt = the runtime library, here Microsoft's msvcrt.dll which is bundled with Windows. An alternative is the newer ucrt.dll, where the "u" stands for "universal". I know the former works well, not sure about the latter. As others have mentioned you can/should install the Visual Studio IDE in order to Get "Hello, world!" up and running. Debug things (its got a nice debugger). However, you should better also work in the command line in order to learn about compiling and linking and resources and input redirection and pipes and environment variables and current directory and much more. You can use the Visual C++ compiler from the command line via command cl, I believe at once backwards short for Lattice C, which was the compiler MS once bought and based their compiler on. After installing VS you can find "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2022" in the Start menu's apps listing. You can use that to invoke cl, but do consider first installing Windows Terminal and making that your default console environment. Personally I instead use a little batch file to set up the requisite environment variables for Visual C++, like this: @echo off call "%VS-ROOT%\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars64.bat" %* set CL=^ /nologo /utf-8 /EHsc /GR /permissive- /std:c++17 /Zc:__cplusplus /Zc:externC- /W4 /wd4459 ^ /D _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS=1 /D _STL_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS=1 The corresponding batch file for MinGW g++ is simpler: @echo off set op=%path% set path=c:\root\installed\MinGW\Nuwen 11-2-0\bin;%op% It's generally a good idea to use two different compilers, such as Visual C++ and g++, mainly because when one compiler's diagnostics get completely ungrokable, the other compiler can give at least a hint about what the problem is. Another reason is that compilers differ in their standards-conformance. When some code compiles cleanly with at least two compilers that have been told to be as conforming as possible, you can have better confidence that the code is valid standard C++. More on reddit.com

As usual when people are asking about MinGW on Windows as a beginner I have to ask (especially because u/KingofGamesYami has already answered): why do you need to use MinGW? If you just want to learn C++ development, then have you considered just installing Visual Studio? More on reddit.com

Yes. MinGW was originally known as mingw32, "Minimalist GNU for W32". The project provides Windows builds of a bunch of GNU software, including GCC. More on reddit.com

mingw works flawlessly

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