Why does GCC-Windows depend on cygwin?

Question

I\'m not a C++ developer, but I\'ve always been interested in compilers, and I\'m interested in tinkering with some of the GCC stuff (particularly LLVM).

On Windows,

Answer 1

Actually, the question premise is wrong: MinGW GCC does NOT require Cygwin.

You will see you don't need Cygwin at all. It runs natively on Windows (32-bit, at least). Both the toolchain and the produced binaries are independent of Cygwin.

The MinGW compilers available in Cygwin are different: they are built on the Cygwin platform, to generate code which does not depend on the Cygwin runtime. The compilers themselves do depend on Cygwin in that case. But that's because you installed them from Cygwin.