# Thoughts and experiences with cygwin, mingw, wsl on Msoft ?



## Alain De Vos (Apr 19, 2021)

Interesting, fantastastic, yuck ?


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## bobmc (Apr 20, 2021)

Experience:  I used the mingw tools when I worked for an engineering company that had lots of windows computers. I liked being able to devel code using Emacs, Make, and GCC.  



			MinGW FAQ
		









						MinGW - Minimalist GNU for Windows
					

Download MinGW - Minimalist GNU for Windows for free. A native Windows port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) This project is in the process of moving to osdn.net/projects/mingw, you can continue to follow us there. MinGW: A native Windows port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), with...




					sourceforge.net
				




Microsoft once licensed Xenix from AT&T.  Now they build monolithic systems with backslashes in filenames.


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## SirDice (Apr 20, 2021)

WSL and WSL2 work like a charm, tested a few things with it but it does what it's supposed to do and it's relatively easy to set up and use. It's a shame there's no WSF (Windows Subsystem for FreeBSD). But who knows what the future might bring


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## a6h (Apr 21, 2021)

This was my setup in the past. Not anymore, not because there's something wrong with that, I just moved on.

* MSYS2/Cygwin for interactive shell + POSIX utilities.
* MSYS2/mingw64 for building native Windows 64-bit.
* Official LLVM binary for Clang on Windows.

* Arch Linux on VM for other linux-y tests and etc (rarely).

* WSL2 to SSH from Visual Studio for GCC
> Linux development with C++ workload
> ARM embedded system (so-called IoT)


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