[dgrunwald]

cygwin is a POSIX-emulating library intended for porting POSIX-only programs to Windows. That is: when compiling for cygwin, you'd use the cygwin POSIX APIs instead of the Windows APIs. So anything compiled with cygwin won't be a normal Windows program.

There's no reason to use cygwin with Rust, since Rust has native Windows support. The only reason to use x86_64-pc-cygwin is if you would need your program to use a C library that is not available for Windows, but is available for cygwin.

If you don't want to/can't use the MSVC linker, the usual alternative is Rust's `x86_64-pc-windows-gnu` toolchain.