Opinions on Cygwin?

[CrazyNorman]

As far as a cross platform programming goes, whats your opinion on writing your threading, sockets, etc. (everything except graphics) using POSIX functions and such, and then using cygwin to compile it under windows? Are there any serious disadvantages?

[Mad_guy]

CYGWIN is kind of it's own platform, it has a crapload of DLLs and such that you use to get into Windows-esque POSIX functions. It's a pretty nice environment really, and I don't think it's too hard to port an authentic NIX application to CYGWIN (I base this on the fact that a lot of very popular UNIX tools (such as ..........X, IRSSI, and practically every single standard tool that exists) are normally found with "CYGWIN binary" amongst' all the .rpm files and such, instead of "Win32 binary")

[CornedBee]

But to be honest, I wouldn't write new applications for it. The Cygwin DLL is meant to provide a POSIX environment under Win32, but it jumps through a few hoops to do so. Programming the POSIX API tends to be inefficient.
I'd rather use a portable runtime (APR, NSPR, ...) from the start.

[Jaqui]

But to be honest, I wouldn't write new applications for it. The Cygwin DLL is meant to provide a POSIX environment under Win32, but it jumps through a few hoops to do so. Programming the POSIX API tends to be inefficient.
I'd rather use a portable runtime (APR, NSPR, ...) from the start.

or use the wxwidgets toolset, which will generate platform specific makefile targets and code generation for all platforms that you want the application to run under.

allows a code once and have portability ease of development.