V8 is a runtime. Cygwin is an entire OS ecosystem of dependencies, tools, libraries. POSIX utilities are so tightly coupled to the OS, it's virtually impossibl

V8 is a runtime. Cygwin is an entire OS ecosystem of dependencies, tools, libraries. POSIX utilities are so tightly coupled to the OS, it's virtually impossible to use them with any degree of confidence without importing the entire universe. There's nothing 'perfectly normal' about such a poorly structured architecture. JS dependencies are explicitly defined in a package's package.json so it's trivial to track a package's dependencies. Likewise, one could create a powershell implementation in JS and -- barring windows-specific features -- Powershell scripts would 'just work' in a nix environment as well. This package makes it trivial to port POSIX tools to Windows. What about greenfield development of utilities that need to work in both nix and Windows? Instead of building for one platform first then porting it to another (incl all the maintenance issues involved in maintaining separate forks in sync) why not use a truly cross-platform language from the start? The Javascript ecosystem comes with it's own package management system. Apt-get attempts to be 'everything to everybody'. It requires a monumental effort from the OSS community to maintain the different sources. Outdated packages are the norm making it harder for software maintainers to resolve bugs. Submitting new packages or publishing new versions of existing packages is a PITA. Etc... NPM's source is centralized and provides a very useful online portal for: searching for packages by keyword and/or tags; publishing the Readme ad human-readable HTML (ie via Markdown); finding related links to the source control, issues, project pages; tracking downloads and development progress stats. If you prefer not to publish to NPM the NPM directory, packages can be installed directly from GitHub, Bitbucket, etc. Tapping the broader exosystem is easy for both users and developers.