Strangely enough, I believe it's possible to have a compiler which produces native win32 code that is native to Linux (by native I mean without using Wine or other such trickery)

I think mingw can actually be built under Linux.

The main target of win32 code is always going to be Windows even if it can be run under wine.

However if you had a big project with a very strange build system (perhaps for embedded Windows systems) you might want to build under Linux and run under Windows.

Suppose you were targetting a large number of different platforms (for instance in embedded) and wanted to have a consistent Linux-based build system. It might be easier to get a Windows cross compiler on Linux than to port your entire build system to Win.

Slarty