Differences between MSYS2 and Cygwin [closed]

Answer 1

As well as I understand, MSYS2 is a fork of Cygwin with main goal to provide possibility to use MinGW-w64 packages. That goal is achieved at expense of total number of available software. Compare list of that of MSYS2 and Cygwin.

Essentially, that’s all. So while you did not need to compile something under MinGW-w64, you would hardly have any reason to use MSYS2 rather than original Cygwin.

Answer 2

Traditionally MSYS bash has been inferior, but mostly because Cygwin remained under active development whereas MSYS didn't. MSYS forked from Cygwin version 1.3.3 and never re-synced, whereas MSYS2 resyncs with the Cygwin project regularly.

We don't have a "sweet pacman like package manager", we have as direct a re-compilation of Arch Linux's pacman package manager as we could achieve.

MSYS2 doesn't have cygwin.dll but it does have msys-2.0.dll which does the same thing (and some more besides). Specifically, arguments that look like paths and the PATH env. var are converted to Windows form when running Windows-native software.

As for whether it's slower, I expect there'd be very little difference but MSYS2 would be a tiny amount slower due to the extra conversion work. Then again, chances are you'll run more Windows-native software from within MSYS2 (such as MinGW-w64 compilers) than you would from Cygwin so that'll shift things back in MSYS2's favour.