Coincidentally, just a few days ago, I tried to run Nim[0] on Windows XP as an experiment.

And to my surprise, the latest 32-bit release of Nim simply works out the box. But Nim compiles to C, so I also needed C compiler. Many versions of mingw I could find online - they all failed to launch.

After some time I managed to find very old Mingw (gcc 4.7.1) that have finally worked [1].

[0] - https://nim-lang.org/

[1] - https://ibb.co/TBdvZPVt

Try MinC, MinC is not Cygwin. Install both the base and the compiler from their page.

https://minc.commandlinerevolution.nl/english/home.html

From what I remember doing it several years ago, it was not too hard to patch MSVC 2019 to run on (not just generate binaries for) XP.

I used CoLinux with pubuntu, and from there install GCC.

TCL/Tk 8.6 for XP, and as a bonus you get a gopher and gemini browser from gopher://hoi.st called BFG:

gopher://texto-plano.xyz:70/1/~anthk/bfgxp

Unzip the file and launch "lanzar.bat" in order to test it. I think I added tcllib and tklib just in case, so you can do a lot with that interpreter.

Anything for Win9x?

I found out the other day you can use modern clang-cl with the MSVC6 headers and it just works. you can download them from here https://github.com/itsmattkc/MSVC600 or just copy it from an install if you have one handy.

then run (something like) this:

  clang-cl /winsysroot:"" /DWINVER=0x0400 /D_WIN32_WINNT=0x0400 -m32 /GS- -march=i586 -Wno-nonportable-include-path /imsvc"C:\MSVC6\VC98\Include" hello.c -fuse-ld=lld-link /link /SAFESEH:NO /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS,4.0 /LIBPATH:"C:\MSVC6\VC98\Lib" user32.lib kernel32.lib msvcrt.lib

I don't know if it's any better or worse than MinGW practically but it is definitely cursed.

I haven't tried it but i saw this a few days ago: https://github.com/crazii/MINGW-toolchains-w9x

Thank you!!!

I'm guessing this no longer qualifies as "modern," since the last update was in 2018 and is no longer in active development, but I'd like to say that the 32bit version of the Tiny C Compiler by Fabrice Bellard works on Windows 98 SE.

https://www.bellard.org/tcc/