5

Most academic researchers I know target just *nix, and rely on Cygwin to make their applications available on Windows. I have tried many of these projects and always found them too unstable for serious use when running on Cygwin.

Uwin looks like a promising alternative to Cygwin. I haven't tried it yet, but I found several comments that it is faster and more stable. However, I haven't seen any use of Uwin to support running *nix apps on Windows.

What are the social and/or technical reasons behind Uwin's lack of popularity?

user287424
  • 209

2 Answers2

11

According to http://slashdot.org/story/01/02/06/2030205/David-Korn-Tells-All (question 11), UWIN was not originally open source (though that appears to have changed in the 11 years since that interview was published). Not being open source would have been a significant barrier to widespread adoption, especially considering a functionally equivalent open source option (Cygwin) was available at the time.

Greg Hewgill
  • 10,201
3

First reason: UWIN was not originally open source; Second reason: Uwin executables requires a running service to be installed on the target OS, while cygwin uses a pure dynamic library.

user83155
  • 31