[_quasimodo]

I think it's part of their philosophy. They don't want to encourage people to use a non-free operating system.

edit: also, supporting windows is a lot of additional work

[_delirium]

> also, supporting windows is a lot of additional work

Yeah, GNU tools are generally written to assume a Unix-like environment. As a result it's relatively easy to port them to anything Unix-like (the BSDs, OS X, etc.). On Windows, Cygwin provides a Unix-like environment, so it's relatively easy to port things to there as well. But to making things work on "native" Windows requires a bunch of Windows-specific porting. That isn't impossible (e.g. GNU Octave has a Windows port), but it requires there being Windows developers interested in volunteering to do it.

[chiachun]

I also think it's because of their philosophy. We now have VirtualBox, Cygwin, etc. So I think it's OK to keep this philosophy.

[yaur]

Also Microsoft isn't doing themselves any favors by not supporting C99 in MSVC, though 2013 is supposed to be much closer.