What is Cygwin used for?

Cygwin is an open source collection of tools that allows Unix or Linux applications to be compiled and run on a Windows operating system from within a Linux-like interface.

Can I have both MinGW and Cygwin?

You can’t combine these two scripts due to the way Bash works. The second script contains things that can only happen once the “MinGW shell” is running.

What is Cygwin compiler?

Cygwin (/ˈsɪɡwɪn/ SIG-win) is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Under Cygwin, source code designed for Unix-like operating systems may be compiled with minimal modification and executed. Cygwin provides native integration of Windows-based applications.

What is the difference between cycygwin and MinGW?

Cygwin is an open-source and large collection of tools that allows Unix or Linux applications to be compiled and run on a Windows operating system within a Linux-like interface. Whereas Mingw is specifically designed to create Windows applications and users do not require to install additional software to run the application.

What is MinGW compiler?

So lets first take MinGW. MinGW stands for Minimalist GNU for Windows. This is a project for providing native GCC compiler for Windows platform. According to MinGW website:

Can I use MinGW tools with Cygwin instead of W64?

Bending the alternatives system to have the tools in /usr/bin point at the MinGW-w64 ones is not a good idea, because that way you’ll be using MinGW tools with Cygwin headers and libraries, which leads to errors like the ones you quoted above. Thanks for contributing an answer to Stack Overflow!

What is Cygwin and how does it work?

From Cygwin’s website: Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts: A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality. A collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel.