MinGW error: ‘thread’ is not a member of ‘std’

This error means that the STL you are using does not contain all the features of C++11.

To access C++11 threads in Windows, you will need a build of Mingw with posix-threads. Here you can find Mingw-Builds v4.8.1: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingwbuilds/files/host-windows/releases/4.8.1/64-bit/threads-posix/sjlj/

There is already a better option: https://github.com/meganz/mingw-std-threads This is a lightweight win32 native implementation of the most used threading and synchronization C++11 classes for MinGW. These are implemented in a header-only library that can co-exist with the system libs. It supports Windows XP as well, which does not have a direct analog of conditional variables.