As of release 0.12, Rust distribution for Windows is completely self-contained and includes all dependencies from MinGW toolchain required for building Windows binaries.

Notes:

1. Rust compiler uses gcc as a linker driver, and will search for it in the system PATH before searching in the private directory. This means that any other versions found on PATH will override the one bundled with Rust, and may cause linking errors if they aren't compatible. The solution is to strip down the PATH in the console session used to launch rustc.
2. The 32-bit binaries produced by rustc will depend on the shared GCC runtime library, libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll, which you will need to distribute along with your program. You'll find it in the /bin directory.
   The 64-bit binaries are dependency-free.

Using Rust with MSYS2

If you want to use any dependencies that depend on C/C++ bits you will likely need a separately installed mingw as the mingw bundled with Rust is not capable of compiling C/C++ code, and only includes a minimal set of libs for system libraries. The recommended way to do this is using MSYS2.

1. Download and install MSYS2 from http://msys2.github.io/.
2. Download and install Rust+Cargo using the installer but be sure to disable the Linker and platform libraries option.
3. Ensure that Rust is in your PATH and that there are no mingw installations in your PATH.
4. Launch your MSYS2 environment using either mingw32_shell.bat or mingw64_shell.bat depending upon which version of Rust you installed.
5. Install the mingw toolchain using pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain or pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-toolchain depending upon which version of Rust you installed.
6. Install the base set of developer tools using pacman -S base-devel.

These instructions cover running Rust from a binary installation. To build Rust see further instructions.