Traditionally MSYS bash has been considered inferior to Cygwin bash. The former was an ancillary tool inside MinGW intended for running autoconf scripts. But now there is MinGW-w64 and MSYS2. The latter ships with a sweet pacman like package manager and elegant shells like zsh, so I wonder if there is still a gap in the emulation layer.
While MinGW* applications are Windows native executables, MSYS2 software requires a POSIX-emulation layer, just like Cygwin does. At least to a casual user, it is hard to spot the differences between the two.
- Which are the functional differences between the two emulation layers (if any)?
- Which emulation is faster (more efficient)?