The author's recommendation of a MinGW-W64 toolchain + Cygwin build utilities is the workflow I followed for several years before moving to MSYS2, before ditchi

The author's recommendation of a MinGW-W64 toolchain + Cygwin build utilities is the workflow I followed for several years before moving to MSYS2, before ditching Windows entirely a few months ago. WSL did its job quite well, but asking a user to set up WSL is out of the question. It isn't well-suited for anything a non-technical person might want to touch. One thing the author doesn't make clear is that MinGW-64 does not fully implement a Linux compatibility layer. For example, if you try to use MinGW to compile a program that calls fork(), you're going to have a bad time. That's why Cygwin is still relevant today - its compatibility layer is much more comprehensive than MinGW, at the cost of an extra DLL that has to follow your program around. Also bear in mind that Cygwin has to do some really nasty things [1] to do everything it does. Whenever you run into a situation where the Unix API doesn't align with the Windows view of the universe, Cygwin runs the risk of introducing severe performance issues. [1] https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/highlights.html https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/highlights.html