by Geoffrey J. Noer

In January 2000, Cygnus was bought by Red Hat.

Content

1. Introduction
2. Porting the GNU Compiler to Win32
3. Initial Goals
4. "Harnessing the Power of the Internet"
5. The Cygwin Architecture
6. Performance
7. Ported Software
8. Future Work
9. Proprietary Alternatives
10. Summary and Conclusions
11. Availability
12. Acknowledgements
13. Trademarks
14. References
15. Document History

Abstract

Cygwin is a full-featured Win32 porting layer for UNIX applications, compatible with all Win32 hosts (currently Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 95, and Windows 98). It was invented in 1995 by Cygnus Solutions as part of the answer to the question of how to port the GNU development tools to the Win32 host.

The Win32-hosted GNUPro compiler tools that use the library are available for a variety of embedded processors as well as a native version for writing Win32 programs. By basing this technology on the GNU tools, Cygnus provides developers with a high-performance, feature-rich 32-bit code development environment, including a graphical source-level debugger.

Cygwin is a Dynamic-Linked Library (DLL) that provides a large subset of the system calls found in common UNIX implementations. The current release includes all POSIX.1/90 calls except for setuid and mkfifo, all ANSI C standard calls, and many common BSD and SVR4 services including Berkeley sockets.

This article will discuss our experiences porting the GNU development tools to the Win32 host and explore the development and architecture of the Cygwin library.

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