Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote:

> In my experience, Cygwin is often used as an
> easy way out for porting open source software to Windows, and SFU/SUA
> seem to exclude at least most of the home users and quite a few laptop
> users.

First, note that Cygwin is GPL unless you buy a commercial license (for a
fee undisclosed by Red Hat).

The Cygwin fork call is not copy-on-write optimized, which makes Cygwin
unsuited for fork-based internet servers. Also, programs that require
inter-process read-only access to huge memory buffers can avoid using
shared memory by forking. This trick will not work on Cygwin.

And then there is the security issue. How safe is Cygwin against various
exploits? As far as I can tell, there is no auto-update of system
components.

> Can one compile gcc for SFU/SUA? Does that have less or more problems
> than gcc for Cygwin?

gcc is the system C compiler on Interix. Microsoft is for some reason not
using their own C compiler, but rather relying on gcc. Perhaps Visual C++
did not pass UNIX certification; or perhaps this is a decision to make
porting from Linux easier. I don't know. But in any case, gcc is
preinstalled, you can build your own, or download one here:

http://www.suacommunity.com/tool_warehouse.htm

Personally I prefer Sun's VirtualBox (PUEL license, not the GPL version)
with a modern Linux or Unix to Cygwin or Interix.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

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