What's the difference between windows-gnu and windows-msvc release?

[saifali-ch]

fd-v8.2.1-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu
fd-v8.2.1-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

Are both releases same? If not which one should I prefer?

[tmccombs]

Which ABI it uses. windows-gnu is compatible with the GCC/MinGW ABI and windows-msvc is compattible with the Microsoft Visual Sutdio compiler ABI. For an application like fd that isn't dynamically linked to anything besides libc, it probably doesn't matter too much. There may be other small differences, such as small differences in performance or size of the executable, but I think either one would work fine.

[saifali-ch]

I perfromed benchmarking on windows with sharkdp/hyperfine and it turns out be that windows-gnu is a bit faster then msvc.
On the other hand, windows-msvc binary size is smaller.

Thanks a lot!
Jazzak Allah

[sharkdp]

I think the MSVC version also has a dependency on some MSVC runtime support DLLs, right?

In any case, it would probably be good to document this somewhere for Windows users.