Hi everyone,
I wanted to explore the possibility of a 64-bit Windows build of Inkscape (for obvious reasons of increased memory availability), and discovered the "effort" had already been done by the great people of MSYS2 and MinGW-w64.
I would strongly suggest the Windows developers look into switching to this development platform instead of the current, manually maintained "devlibs" setup. Perhaps this suggestion can be made more plausible if I attempt to explain what MSYS2 and MinGW-w64 provide.
MinGW-w64 is an active project that provides Win32 headers and libraries so that GCC can be used on Windows, both 32- and 64-bit. It has replaced "ye olde" MinGW.org on numerous Linux distros (most notably Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and Arch). It is also the toolchain distributed alongside the Qt SDK releases.
MSYS2 is an updated version of the old MSYS (it takes a newer version of Cygwin, applies the MSYS patches, and presto: a Unix shell environment for building Unix/cross-platform software on Windows). Additionally, MSYS2 provides a complete repository of binary packages, linux-distro style. What the developers did was port Arch Linux' package manager, pacman, and create a whole ecosystem around it of ready-made MinGW-w64 packages. The full list can be found here.
You'll notice that the list contains a mingw-w64-inkscape package. What this means is that there is an easy way of obtaining/building/... inkscape on Windows, without the need to jump through too many hoops.
I'm not saying you guys should drop everything and come hide in the shade of MSYS2, but instead evaluate the current build process on Windows, and perhaps provide a simplified way of developing Inkscape on this platform. A free bonus would be the possibility of providing a 64-bit Inkscape build, which is already possible without any 64-bit Windows patches thanks to good code by you guys ;-).
Also note that cross-compilation from Linux shouldn't be much harder either, all the aforementioned distros have an extensive list of MinGW-w64 libraries at their disposal, and using CMake should make it all "just work". The current wiki's instructions look abysmally complicated compared to the simplicity made possible by the MinGW-w64/MSYS2 combo.
I strongly hope you take this into consideration, as it will lead to a lower entry for developing Inkscape on windows, which in turn will lead to quicker bug-fixing (I hope ;-)).
Thanks and keep up the fine work!
Ruben (known as rubenvb in the MinGW-w64 mailing community)