Please help me differentiate and understand what Cygwin and MinGW (Minimalistic GNU for Windows) are. In terms of usage and installation which is more user-friendly and does it require a professional background in IT to understand it clearly?
How technical these two are?
Cygwin Is Linux environment on window OS. if you need to work on Linux environment you will probably go for a virtual environment. But it is not good if you are creating a program for the linux environment .there you find some limitations of virtual machines. Some of the Linux functions like fork(), mmap() or ioctl() will not work on windows directly. They have windows native functions. Cygwin act as a layer above windows to work Linux native programs on windows.
MingW is a Windows GNU compiler tools, like GCC, Make, Bash, etc, which run directly in Windows without any emulation layer. By default it will compile to a native Win32 native code. It build executables like.exe or application extensions like .dll files.
