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One thing I do like about msys over cygwin is that compiled binaries don't have a dependency on a dll. If msys2 is using cygwin libraries, does it have the same dependency?

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You're wrong about that; mingw doesn't require dependency on the dll, msys does.

Huh?

No. Cygwin depends on a DLL. Mingw does not.

Msys is just a user-land set of tools.

Yep, but those tools rely on a DLL (msys-1.0.dll or msys-2.0.dll,) which is Cygwin by another name. MSYS is not MinGW. Programs like Bash will never run under MinGW because they rely on things like fork(), which are only provided by Unix, Cygwin, or a Cygwin fork like MSYS.

.. ish, there are significant differences. In terms of amount of code, minor, but in terms of behaviour, not so. Mainly, when msys-2.0.dll detects it is calling a native program it translates any arguments that look like paths to Windows form. The same is true for some specific environment variables.

I thought some of the msys tools relied on a cygwin-like DLL for fork().

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