MinGW is awesome: http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS It's not Cygwin "MinGW, being Minimalist, does not, and never will, attempt to

MinGW is awesome: http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS It's not Cygwin "MinGW, being Minimalist, does not, and never will, attempt to provide a POSIX runtime environment for POSIX application deployment on MS-Windows. If you want POSIX application deployment on this platform, please consider Cygwin instead."; there's no emulation layer at all.