Good alternatives to Cygwin? - Cygwin doesn't support natively support Win32 apps

Question

Update 1/9/2014: TL;DR version: Go to bottom of this post for a way to get Cygwin to be able to call non-Cygwin programs.

After having spent the ti

Answer 1

Cygnal is my project to create a modified Cygwin, serving as a run-time support library for applications intended to run as native Windows programs, following external conventions familiar to Windows users.

The idea is that you can use the full Cygwin environment to develop, using its default toolchain: the same compiler that makes Cygwin executables. Then you can deploy your program as a Cygnal program by bundling it with the modified cygwin1.dll from the Cygnal project.

This is especially useful for programs that have a lot of POSIX dependencies and need a decently feature-rich, good quality POSIX implementation.

The project lead doesn't appear to consider this to be a real problem, since they apparently don't really support running non-Cygwin programs from within Cygwin (surprise!).

By contrast, in the Cygnal project, this sort of thing is considered an issue for which a reasonable solution will be merged.