Re: [Mingw-msys] cygwin vs msys and msys comments

[Greg C. <gch...@sb...>]

On 2008-04-04 01:25Z, Caleb Cushing wrote:
> On Thursday 03 April 2008 08:34:00 pm JonY wrote:
>> Hi,
>> Cygwin attempts to emulate much of POSIX on Windows, the downside is all
>> programs compiled to take advantage of cygwin features rely on
>> cygwin1.dll. It has nice UNIX features though such as fork and UNIX
>> sockets emulation.
>>
>> MSYS is an old Cygwin fork containing a subset of UNIX support
>> applications. Its primary use is to ease porting applications using UNIX
>> style build system such as autotools while using MinGW tools to build
>> it, a convenience for Win32 users. All programs will link to msvcrt.dll.
>> One does not usually "compile for MSYS" unless developing for MSYS.
> 
> so you could build a *nix app as win32 with say mingw but not have to worry 
> about the dll?

'cygwin1.dll' handles the posix emulation, which many *nix apps
need. If you want to do without the dll, then you have to do
without the posix emulation. Generally, that means rewriting the
program to use the msw api instead: e.g., translating fork() to
CreateProcess(), which is not always trivial. Some apps build
OOTB because they're designed to work on multiple platforms, but
that's by no means the universal practice.