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Comment by dordoka | Hacker News Reader

While they are at it, they could create a posix compatible layer for Windows. That would really drive some conversion.

edit: after rereading my comment and seeing the downvotes, just to clarify, it was a serious, not negative suggestion. :)

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There used to be Windows Services for UNIX (a.k.a. Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771470.aspx

They ditched in Windows Server 2012.

Now recommend cygwin.

"The Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) is deprecated. If you use the SUA POSIX subsystem with this release, use Hyper-V to virtualize the server. If you use the tools provided by SUA, switch to Cygwin's POSIX emulation, or use either mingw-w64 (available from Sourceforge.net) or MinGW (available from MinGW.org) for doing a native port. " https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831568.aspx

msys2 is a lot better than mingw+msys and cygwin, in my opinion. I switched months ago and its been a lot easier to deal with.

They've done that before and, as far as I know, it was not an extremely popular product.

It was not an extremely functional product. It was largely there to get government contracts where one of the requirements was POSIX conformance, even if they weren't using it.

Imagining they had first-class support for it (a major undertaking, I'd guess, but anyway) how many people would use it? I'd guess it'd be about the same people who use Cygwin now.

Anyone porting applications from Linux would be able to use it to reduce the effort.

Yes, but I think Microsoft's ultimate concern is how many people will want to use such applications. How many will? Think about how few people run, say, PHP applications under Windows. Even though it's possible. (Well, actually, often it won't work right because PHP developers don't bother to test with anything besides Linux)

Why would you guess that? Because cygwin is nothing close to first class support. It has a lot of friction associated with its use. You're better off just running linux in a vm if you want posix on windows, and trust me plenty of people do that these days.

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