having both mingw32 and mingw64 in path - is it ok?

Question

quick question: is it safe to have both ming32 and ming64 runtimes in path?

As they are 32 vs. 64 I would guess dlls would not clash and properly resolved in both cased, but maybe I am missing something.

FYI: It works in fact on my computer, I am just not sure about the theory.

Answer 1

The rule is simple, Win will locate:

• Executables (when not launched with full path)
• DLL s (loaded (recursively) by executables)

in the directories from %PATH% that come first.

References:

• [SS64]: How-to: Windows Environment Variables (a quick browse didn't reveal a "more official" resource)
• [MS.Docs]: Dynamic-Link Library Search Order

A MinGW version is stand alone (doesn't depend on the other), so if all its dir s are in %PATH% , it will be chosen automatically, and the 2 ^nd version is simply going be ignored therefore its presence in %PATH% is useless (actually, it will add additional overhead when the OS will search those dir s too).
However , if dir s from the 2 versions are inserted interleavedly (some dir s from 1 ^st version, some from 2 ^nd version, some other dir s from 1 ^st version, ...), then you might (and most likely will) get in trouble, so don't do it .

I guess you need both variants to generate 064bit and 032bit binaries. But doesn't GCC 's -m32 argument work?