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by PaulHoule 1036 days ago
Notably Microsoft does not document an API to the kernel, the official userspace interface in Windows is the DLLs they provide. In that since, Wine, which provides DLLs that implement the same interface over the Linux kernel is conforming to the way windows works, and Cygwin, which provided a POSIX-like libc that ran on the Windows kernel is a Windows-centric way to implement POSIX.

(That said, the path of WSL 1, which emulated the Linux syscall interface on Windows, takes advantage of the idea Windows NT had from the very beginning which was implementing "personalities" that could pretend to be other OS, such as the original plan for Windows NT to be OS/2 compatible.)