Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUs...

"This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself. It's fast and lightweight and it's the real binaries. This is an genuine Ubuntu image on top of Windows with all the Linux tools I use like awk, sed, grep, vi, etc. It's fast and it's lightweight. The binaries are downloaded by you - using apt-get - just as on Linux, because it is Linux. You can apt-get and download other tools like Ruby, Redis, emacs, and on and on. This is brilliant for developers that use a diverse set of tools like me."

"This runs on 64-bit Windows and doesn't use virtual machines. Where does bash on Windows fit in to your life as a developer?

If you want to run Bash on Windows, you've historically had a few choices.

Cygwin - GNU command line utilities compiled for Win32 with great native Windows integration. But it's not Linux. HyperV and Ubuntu - Run an entire Linux VM (dedicating x gigs of RAM, and x gigs of disk) and then remote into it (RDP, VNC, ssh) Docker is also an option to run a Linux container, under a HyperV VM Running bash on Windows hits in the sweet spot. It behaves like Linux because it executes real Linux binaries. Just hit the Windows Key and type bash. "

http://www.mingw.org/wiki/msys

You're getting confused with MinGW, which uses MSYS to build native Windows executables. They need MSYS (as a Cygwin-derived emulation layer) because tools like GCC or Bash expect the system to support POSIX APIs and have POSIX semantics-- for example, Windows has no equivalent to a POSIX fork() call. The code you're compiling under MinGW has no MSYS or Cygwin dependencies, but the compiler and tools themselves (gcc, bash, the linker, etc.) do.

In fact the binaries, that are compiled with MinGW, link with MSVCRT by default (Microsoft Visual C Run-Time DLL). So no compatibility layer, and they don't rely on Cygwin.