Blender has MinGW support, but that only allows 32-bit complication using gcc. I propose that Blender receives MinGW-w64 support, which is a variant of MinGW that supports 64-bit complication.

I am not against the Microsoft compiler, but I believe that an alternate should be offered. The gcc compiler has some (if not many) advantages to the Microsoft compiler such as better standards support and more code optimization flags (march=cpu-type for example).

This change would also benefit anyone who wants to create a 64-bit build Blender on Windows and can not afford the expensive Visual Studio. The free versions of Visual Studio do not support 64-bit building, which leaves MinGW-w64 as the only free alternate. Complex scenes can use over 4 GB of memory so 64-bit builds are sometimes needed.

MinGW-w64 can be found at: http://mingw-w64.sourceforge.net/