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by david-given 3926 days ago
Interix. Microsoft's Unix. It runs on the NT kernel alongside win32 as another process personality. Most windowses come with the Interix core, and you can get the userland part from Microsoft --- it's called Services For Unix these days, I think. It even comes with GCC. It's a pretty nice piece of work, behaving just like an old school Unix.

But it's largely been abandoned by Microsoft and is buggy as hell and difficult to install; and its an old old-school Unix, so it's missing a lot of the modern system calls and libraries that make Unixes nice. (I don't even know if win10 supports it.)
1 comments
avian 3926 days ago
Interesting. I didn't know they had a replacement after they dumped the POSIX kernel personality in Windows XP.

Wikipedia says that "Interix will not be included in Windows versions after Windows 8" though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix

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david-given 3926 days ago
...that page cites one of my projects as a reference? May all the gods have mercy on our souls...

Yeah, it's obviously been destaffed at Microsoft. There's a blog, last updated years ago. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sfu/

I know it's likely to be impossible, but if anyone at Microsoft's reading this (and chances are they are), whacking all the source code up on codeplex or github would be awesome. It worked so, so much better than Cygwin.

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