C Standard Library for Win32/Win64 other than MSCRT

Question

In unix/linux world, there are a couple of different C Standard Library implementations to choose from and link against, but although I spent some time searching for an alternative to Microsoft's C Runtime Library, I couldn't find anything.

I also took a look at MinGW and CLANG docs and saw that they both link against MSCRT under Windows.

My question is: Is there any alternative C Standard Library implementation to use under Win32/Win64? If yes, I'd appreciate you mentioning whether static and/or dynamic linking is supported by that implementation.

Answer 1

On Windows, when not using Microsoft's MSVC compiler, there is only the MinGW standard library and it's successor MinGW-w64 (which supports both Windows 32-bit and 64-bit).

Both GCC and LLVM/CLang toolchains targetting MinGW-w64 exist (see https://winlibs.com/ and https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw).

These days there is also a choice between which Windows' underlying libraries to use: MSVCRT or UCRT. The former is the one used since the early days of win32, the latter is for more recent Windows versions (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/porting/upgrade-your-code-to-the-universal-crt).