Windows development: MinGW64 or MSVC ?

[Johan Engelen via digitalmars-d-ldc]

I've successfully built LDC using MinGW64 for x86_64 [1], and can
now execute a simple Hello World program. My patches to LDC's
druntime were very quickly merged, thanks Kai!

Unfortunately, many tests fail because of missing symbols when
linking. To fix this, I'd have to make more changes to druntime
(I fear that a lot of small patch ups are required), adding
special cases for MinGW/Windows. I'm wondering if I am doing
something that is pretty useless...
It seems to me that druntime assumes MSVC everywhere, and I do
not know if MinGW support is desired. For example, in
druntime/src/core/stdc/fenv.d the fenv_t struct defined for
Windows is completely different from the one in MinGW32 and
MinGW64's header files; I guess that means that no-one is using
MinGW?

I no longer know why I do not just use MSVC to build LDC. [2]
Is there a good reason one would use MinGW64 over MSVC? :)

Thanks for your comments,
    Johan


[1]
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/Toolchains%20targetting%20Win64/Personal%20Builds/mingw-builds/4.9.2/threads-posix/seh/x86_64-4.9.2-release-posix-seh-rt_v3-rev1.7z

[2] I come from Inkscape development. For Inkscape, we provide
pre-built binaries on Windows, so one can get going really
quickly without the pains of compiling all dependencies (a lot).
These binaries are compiled using... MinGW, hence so far I have
only used MinGW and not MSVC.