glibc not supported by Cygwin

Question

Cygwin FAQ has the following info for 'Where is glibc?' : Cygwin does not provide glibc. It uses newlib instead, which provides much (but not all) of the same functionality. Porting glibc to Cygwin would be difficult.

I was surprised and checked out the release packages as i had earlier used it. While i checked the repositories, it appears that glibc was actually indeed part of cygwin until version 2.10. Can anyone tell of the porting difficulty for the subsequent versions of glibc ?

Answer 1

The Cygwin FAQ is correct, of course; glibc has never been part of Cygwin. The C library on Cygwin is cygwin1.dll (part of the cygwin package), which is based on newlib.

Answer 2

The answer to your question is similar to this. Port glibc to OS like Windows is horrible work. Maybe the worst part is port all system call interface to SO non-POSIX. Glibc is a monster. There are other options if you need a C Lib: newlib and uClibc