What is the difference between Cygwin and MinGW?

 

I want to make my C++ project cross platform, and I'm considering using Cygwin/MinGW. But what is the difference between them ?

Another question is whether I will be able to run the binary on a system without Cygwin/MinGW ?

Cygwin is an attempt to create a complete UNIX/POSIX environment on Windows. To do this it uses various DLLs. While these DLLs are covered by GPLv3+, their license contains an exception that does not force a derived work to be covered by the GPLv3+. MinGW is a C/C++ compiler suite which allows you to create Windows executables without dependency on such DLLs - you only need the normal MSVC runtimes, which are part of any normal Microsoft Windows installation.

You can also get a small UNIX/POSIX like environment, compiled with MinGW called MSYS. It doesn't have anywhere near all the features of Cygwin, but is ideal for programmers wanting to use MinGW.

As a simplification, it's like this:

  • Compile something in Cygwin and you are compiling it for Cygwin.

  • Compile something in MinGW and you are compiling it for Windows.

    • About Cygwin

    The purpose of Cygwin is to make porting *nix-based applications to Windows much easier, by emulating many of the small details that Unix-based operating systems provide, and are documented by the POSIX standards. If your application assumes that it can use Unix feature such as pipes, Unix-style file and directory access, and so forth, then you can compile it in Cygwin and Cygwin itself will act as a compatibility layer around your application, so that many of these Unix-specific paradigms can continue to be used with little or no modification to your application.

    If you want to compile something for Cygwin and distribute that resulting application, you must also distribute the Cygwin run-time environment (provided by cygwin1.dll ) along with it, and this has implications for what types of software license you may use.

    About MinGW

    MinGW is a Windows port of the GNU compiler tools, such as GCC, Make, Bash, and so on. It does not attempt to emulate or provide comprehensive compatibility with Unix, but instead it provides the minimum necessary environment to use GCC (the GNU compiler) and a small number of other tools on Windows. It does not have a Unix emulation layer like Cygwin, but as a result your application needs to specifically be programmed to be able to run in Windows, which may mean significant alteration if it was created to rely on being run in a standard Unix environment and uses Unix-specific features such as those mentioned earlier. By default, code compiled in MinGW's GCC will compile to a native Windows X86 target, including .exe and .dll files, though you could also cross-compile with the right settings. MinGW is an open-source alternative to Microsoft Visual C++ compiler and its associated linking/make tools.

    Considerably sophisticated cross-platform frameworks exist which make the task of porting applications to various operating systems easily - for example the Qt framework is a popular framework for cross-platform applications. If you use such a framework from the start, you can not only reduce your headaches when it comes time to port to another platform but you can use the same graphical widgets - windows, menus and controls - across all platforms if you're writing a GUI app.

    To add to the other answers, Cygwin comes with the MinGW libraries and headers and you can compile without linking to the cygwin1.dll by using -mno-cygwin flag with gcc. I greatly prefer this to using plain MinGW and MSYS.

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