http://stackoverflow.com/questions/771756/what-is-the-difference-between-cygwin-and-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.
Wikipedia does a comparison here.
From Cygwin‘s website:
- Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts: A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.
- A collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel.
From Mingw‘s website:
MinGW ("Minimalistic GNU for Windows") is a collection of freely available and freely distributable Windows specific header files and import libraries combined with GNU toolsets that allow one to produce native Windows programs that do not rely on any 3rd-party C runtime DLLs.
Read these answered questions to understand the difference between Cygwin and MinGW.
Question #1: I want to create an application that I write source code once, compile it once and run it in any platforms (e.g. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X…).
Answer #1: Write your source code in JAVA. Compile the source code once and run it anywhere.
Question #2: I want to create an application that I write source code once but there is no problem that I compile the source code for any platforms separately (e.g. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X …).
Answer #2: Write your source code in C or C++. Use standard header files only. Use a suitable compiler for any platform (e.g. Visual Studio for Windows, GCC for Linux and XCode for Mac). Note that you should not use any advanced programming features to compile your source code in all platforms successfully. If you use none C or C++ standard classes or functions, your source code does not compile in other platforms.
Question #3: In answer of question #2, it is difficult using different compiler for each platform, is there any cross platform compiler?
Answer #3: Yes, Use GCC compiler. It is a cross platform compiler. To compile your source code in Windows use MinGW that provides GCC compiler for Windows and compiles your source code to native Windows program. Do not use any advanced programming features (like Windows API) to compile your source code in all platforms successfully. If you use Windows API functions, your source code does not compile in other platforms.
Question #4: C or C++ standard header files do not provide any advanced programming features like multi-threading. What can I do?
Answer #4: You should use POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface [for UNIX]) standard. It provides many advanced programming features and tools. Many operating systems fully or partly POSIX compatible (like Mac OS X, Solaris, BSD/OS and ...). Some operating systems while not officially certified as POSIX compatible, conform in large part (like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and ...). Cygwin provides a largely POSIX-compliant development and run-time environment for Microsoft Windows.
Thus: