12 Facts About Cygwin

Cygwin is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows.

Cygwin is free and open-source software, released under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3.

Rather than rewrite the tools to use the Win32 runtime environment, Cygwin implemented a POSIX-compatible environment in the form of a dynamic-link library.

Cygwin environment is provided in two versions; the full 64-bit version and a stripped down 32-bit version that is slowly being phased out.

Programmers have ported many Unix, GNU, BSD and Linux programs and packages to Cygwin, including the X Window System, K Desktop Environment 3, GNOME, Apache, and TeX.

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Cygwin permits installing inetd, syslogd, sshd, Apache, and other daemons as standard Windows services, allowing Microsoft Windows systems to emulate Unix and Linux servers.

Cygwin programs are installed by running Cygwin's "setup" program, which downloads the necessary program and feature package files from repositories on the Internet.

Version of gcc that comes with Cygwin has various extensions for creating Windows DLLs, specifying whether a program is a windowing or console-mode program, adding resources, etc.

Support for compiling programs that do not require the POSIX compatibility layer provided by the Cygwin DLL used to be included in the default gcc, but as of 2014 is provided by cross-compilers contributed by the MinGW-w64 project.

Cygwin is used heavily for porting many popular pieces of software to the Windows platform.

Cygwin began in 1995 as a project of Steve Chamberlain, a Cygnus engineer who observed that Windows NT and 95 used COFF as their object file format, and that GNU already included support for x86 and COFF, and the C library newlib.

Cygwin thought it would be possible to retarget GCC and produce a cross compiler generating executables that could run on Windows.