[wizzwizz4]

Those are runtime environments provided by DLLs (requiring recompilation), not Wine-like translation layers. WSL 1 was something special, and it says something that Microsoft ditched it in favour of "we've invented virtual machines for the very first time!!!".

[hnlmorg]

It’s been a while since I’ve played with Cygwin and I do recall there were a lot of stuff compiled for Windows, but couldn’t it also run Linux software run natively too?

Admittedly back then I was working for a place that mainly developed in Perl, so I didn’t port a whole lot of ELFs across. So maybe I’m misremembering

[bithead]

When I was on the team migrating datacenters, we got ahold of tcpdump.exe which didn't need winpcap presumably because it was staticly compiled under cygwin - I'm fairly certain someone didn't write the entire thing including winpcap from scratch.

It was nice because getting anything approved by the windows sysadmin group was like changing the tire on a moving truck.

It was more than a godsend, because when a windows server was plugging into "the wrong vlan" we could just give them the tcpdump command to capture a CDP/LLDP packet and tell us which switch and port the box was physically connected to.

[hnlmorg]

A lot of software from the Linux/UNIX world will have macros to support Windows even without cygwin.

For example with tcpdump:

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Athe-tcpdump-group%2Ftcpdu...

So it’s not quite the same thing as what we were discussing further up the thread. Though it’s still an interesting anecdote in its own right.

[wizzwizz4]

I had to confirm this, but you are misremembering. https://www.sobyte.net/post/2021-11/cygwin-mingw-msys/ gives a good rundown.

[hnlmorg]

Ahhh. It must just have been shell scripts, Perl and the likes that I ran under cygwin then.

Thanks for correction