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

The Cygwin version of GCC requires Cygwin to be installed, for programs it compiles.

The MinGW version does not require anything after compiling, other than a working copy of Windows.

You can't really mix the Cygwin environment, and the MinGW compilers together, because Cygwin changes the paths of the precompiled libraries.

If you need a bash style shell, but don't want to use Cygwin, I would recommend MSYS.

Cygwin in contrast to MinGW

copied from MinGW Wiki

Cygwin applications by principle are not considered a "Native Win32 application" because it relies on the Cygwin® POSIX Emulation DLL or cygwin1.dll for Posix functions and does not use win32 functions directly. MinGW on the other hand, provides functions supplied by the Win32 API. While porting applications under MinGW, functions not native to Win32 such as fork(), mmap() or ioctl() will need to be reimplemented into Win32 equivalents for the application to function properly.