OCaml can generate binaries that do not depend on Cygwin runtimes, and that's a common way to ship binaries. There are a number of development shops who have been doing that for years.

For development on Windows, Cygwin is commonly used for "casual" use, and can be tricky to get working if you're not familiar with the quirks of that toolchain. That's going to improve quite rapidly though: I just announced that our development focus from the OCaml Platform for opam (our package manager) is to get Windows support working end-to-end.

There aren't any real blockers to Windows support except for building a critical mass of developers to smooth out the thousands of details that get in the way right now: you can find more here: https://github.com/ocaml/opam/wiki/opam-2.2-slides.pdf

From a compiler developer's perspective, the number of variations of toolchains available on modern Windows is absolutely mindboggling. I'm looking forward to switching to Windows 10 from my OpenBSD desktop and getting familiar with all of this. Last time I seriously used Windows (95), the desktop eSheep app all the rage. I'm informed that it is now available for Windows 10: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/esheep-64bit/9mx2v0tqt6rm