Should rustc.exe be statically linked to libgcc etc.?

[ssylvan]

Right now a user would have to have MinGW installed, and its bin directory on their path, in order to run rustc. Perhaps those dependencies should either be taken care of by the installer, or be statically linked into the executable?

[brson]

We need to do something here for sure. I'm not sure where the libgcc dependency is, and if we need it for every rust crate or just rustc. Possibly worse than that is that rustc has a run-time dependency on gcc.exe.

[graydon]

I do not think this is fixable in the timeframe in question. We're still very much wedded to mingw on windows.

[graydon]

Possibly we should ship libgcc and when rustc runs, it can discover the missing gcc/ld it will need to link stuff and fail gracefully with an error message rather than just reporting a missing DLL at startup.

[pnkfelix]

Not critical for 0.6; de-milestoning

[catamorphism]

Nominating for milestone 5, production-ready

[graydon]

sub-bug / dupe of #3459, mingw has to be generally removed from dependencies