GnuWin32 or Cygwin - from a programmers point of view

Question

For a programmer with Linux skills and a love of the command line, what is better to use on Windows - Cygwin or GnuWin32?

I tried to find a good comparison or a list of differences but couldn't find anything remotely complete. Also, I wondered whether this should be a superuser.com question, but decided against it, because I'm asking precisely for use of the tool for a programmer.

I'd like to know the common pitfalls and restrictions of each of the solutions. Interoperability with windows is an important issue, for my main development is done in MSVC...

Claypoole

Perhaps not SuperUser.com, but programmers.stackexchange.com for sure. – Roulade

I see 1000 tagged questions on SO, with 14 for gnuwin32. Go with the community. – Draggle

@Eric, that may just mean that there's almost 100 times more problems with Cygwin ;) – Claypoole

Ha. In seriousness, my experience with CygWin has been good, one I figured out the right way to set it up: wilsonericn.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/cygwin-setup-gotchas I'm not providing an answer, though, because I've never heard of gnuwin32, and don't know what MSVC is. – Draggle

I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to do, but since you mention the command line, are you trying to do scripting? If so, save yourself some trouble and use Powershell or python for windows. – Illinois

Answer 1

It is absolutely no contest

GnuWin32 does not include Bash

This is a critical part of the Cygwin distribution. Switching from cmd.exe to Bash was a huge boon to my productivity. cmd.exe is cripped in comparison to Bash.

GnuWin32 is old

Many program go years without being updated.

• tar 2003
• coreutils 2005
• zlib 2005
• make 2006
• wget 2008

I would not use GnuWin32 unless I had no other choice.

Obtuse