Cygwin can see every Windows file trivially via /cygdrive. Programs compiled in cygwin are mostly native code that at the bottom rely on Windows DLLs. This is a

Cygwin can see every Windows file trivially via /cygdrive. Programs compiled in cygwin are mostly native code that at the bottom rely on Windows DLLs. This is a pretty significant difference from an emulator or a virtual machine (someone mentioned Parallels below).