[michaelsbradley]

Aren’t you thinking of Cygwin, or the MSYS2 shell (dev tooling)?

The Windows-native software you build with MSYS2 can be shipped to and run by users that don’t have anything of MSYS2 installed.

[reactordev]

He must be thinking of Cygwin as half of this is installed when you install git ;) Git Bash, etc…

[okanat]

MSYS2 is repacked Cygwin though. It is literally the same codebase compiled with slightly different flags. You need a full Unix environment for Bash to run, not just Mingw toolchain. The difference is Cygwin aims to create a full Unix system while MSYS2 just enough development environment to run bash, make etc to build native Windows programs with Mingw.

Git installs its own Mingw and Msys2 stuff but mostly compiled for a Mingw environment so they consume Windows paths natively instead of using MSYS2/Cygwin path conversion. That's why when you have mixed PATH variable all hell breaks loose with Git.

[delta_p_delta_x]

It was not clear what the parent commenter was addressing; I was under the impression they meant 'compile against the MSYS2 environment', which is broadly Cygwin, yes, which should not be forced onto a user.

[michaelsbradley]

Okay, but that just seems to be perpetuating the misunderstanding of what MSYS2 is intended for.

It gives you a *nix-like shell/dev environment and tools, but you build native software that runs on Windows systems that don’t have or need to have all/parts of MSYS2/Cygwin installed.