MinGW / gcc: The application was unable to start c

Question

I have been using MinGW and the GNU Fortran compiler for a while in order to compile Fortran programs on Windows, which has always been a successful method. However, I have been getting the following error for the past 4 days:
The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b). Click OK to close the application.

The error only happens when running applications that I wrote myself, and that I compiled using the MinGW/gfortran combo. When compiling using Visual Studio and iFort, I have no problem running the applications. The error seems retroactive: applications that were compiled using gfortran a long time ago and ran perfectly until now also break, even though I didn't recompile them. This leads me to think that it is a dynamic library problem. Online searches show that it probably is a compatibility problem between a 64-bit dll and a 32-bit application

I am using Windows 7. One of the latest things I remember doing before starting to get the problem was trying to update MinGW ; I used the mingw-get update and mingw-get upgrade command lines.

After looking around online, I have tried the following fixes:
- reinstalled the Visual C++ Runtime Environment
- reinstalled the .NET framework
- downloaded and replaced a bunch of .dlls like mscvr100.dll, mscvr100d.dll, etc...
- uninstalled and reinstalled MinGW in order to make sure I had the latest gcc version
- run Dependency Walker on a simple application ("Hello World!" type program)

Dependency Walker tells me that a number of .dlls cannot be found (full list: API-MS-WIN-APPMODEL-RUNTIME-L1-1-0.DLL, API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-ERROR-L1-1-0.DLL, API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-L1-1-0.DLL, API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-ROBUFFER-L1-1-0.DLL, API-MS-WIN-CORE-WINRT-STRING-L1-1-0.DLL, API-MS-WIN-SHCORE-SCALING-L1-1-1.DLL, DCOMP.DLL, GPSVC.DLL, IESHIMS.DLL).
It also highlights in red the libquadmath-0.dll (on which libgfortran-3.dll seems to depend). Indeed, it seems that libquadmath-0.dll is a 64-bit DLL in the middle of a 32-bit program. When opening said .dll with Dependency Walker, I can see that all the modules in this library are x86 except the library itself which is x64 (CPU column of DW). I am not exactly sure how this is possible / how to fix it. The library is found in the Python/Anaconda folder (I installed Python and Anaconda a few weeks ago, the problem did NOT appear at that time).

If anybody has an idea of how to get my environment to work again without reinstalling Windows, I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks!!

Answer 1

I had a similar problem. Looking at Dependency Walker I wasn't loading API-MS-WIN-CORE entries. However, when I went to edit my path it turned out that by bin folder wasn't on the path. Adding, in my case the mingw64 bin folder to the path fixed this issue for me. I only mention the API-MS-WIN-CORE entries since I thought it might be the problem, but in reality it wasn't causing my issue.

Answer 2

I was getting this same error code, and used Dependency Walker to discover that, in my case, the 64-bit version of libwinpthread-1.dll was not being found. This helped me resolve my issue. So, the solution is to determine the missing dll, track it down on your system and reference its location in your path variable, or find out how to install it if you don't have it. That said, I also came across the following caveat that's important to know about when using Dependency Walker. It's currently out of date and will actually show false results for WIN-CORE dlls: https://stackoverflow.com/a/36244483/4438237

To work around this, there's a newer program called Dependencies by lucasg, that properly interprets these and won't mistakenly tell you about these falsely missing dlls.

Answer 3

I had a similar error but over came it by editing my environment variables. I had g77 as part of my path variables and by removing it and leaving gfortran alone, the error disappeared

Answer 4

I was getting same Error, as mentioned in above answers the problem is "path not being set" aside from setting path you can alternatively Do this; if u don't want to set the path for some reason:

1. Open CMD
2. cd C:\MinGW\bin to navigate to the bin directory of mingw
3. now u can compile the code as following Gcc (dir of ur .c file) -o (ur output dir) for ex : gcc I:\dir\Hello.c -o I:\dir\output.exe

alternatively if u want to automate the process u can make a batch file to automatically do it for you. here's the batch file if anyone needs it

@echo off

C:

cd \MinGW\bin\

gcc I:\dir*.c -o "I:\dir\Output.exe" Rem Replace "dir" with your own directory and * with ur own FileName!

pause