The excellent MSYS2 (mingw64 and mingw32) subsytem makes compiling native Windows compilations "as easy as compilation can be". However, as with everything in life, sometimes when trying to do one thing (compile a program), you end up chasing other vaguely related issues (one exotic compile error after another).

For synchronizing files between servers and workstations I use the open source GPLv3 licensed Unison File Synchronizer [1]. Although the text interface version of Unison compiles straight-out-of-the box on mingw64, the GTK2 interface proved to be a bit more cumbersome.

To compile Unison with the GTK2 interface, lablgtk [2] is needed, an OCaml interface to GTK.

So, the journey began with firing up a shell in a fresh mingw64 environment, and installing the build prerequisites:

pacman -Sy --noconfirm base-devel git \
mingw-w64-x86_64-{glib2,gtk2,ocaml,pango,toolchain}

After downloading the latest source (2.18.5 [3]) and trying to compile it (using make ) after running

./configure --prefix=/mingw64 --disable-gtktest

the first error message is shown: