Actually you can, as long as it doesn't use Win10 APIs (or use them via dynamic loading) it will work on Win7. The issue with glibc is that when you use it it

Actually you can, as long as it doesn't use Win10 APIs (or use them via dynamic loading) it will work on Win7. The issue with glibc is that when you use it it adds requests for the latest versions of the exported symbols that the glibc you use in your system has. You can work around this in a variety of ways (e.g. use __asm__ to specify the version you want and use the header files of an older glibc to ensure that you aren't using incompatible calls) but you need to go out of your way to ensure that whereas in Windows you can just not use the API (well, also make sure your language's runtime library doesn't use the API either but in practice this is less of a concern).