> I've to say that you've clearly thought a lot about this, and though I've not tried it (and probably won't) you seem to have done an excellent job.

Thank you. I needed that. I started the project in 2016 and have been obsessed with it since then. The weird thing is that I never had to use workarounds or hacks that are mentioned by the Cygwin team [0]. For instance, the select() call does map cleanly on top of the Win32 API. I just needed to use WSAWaitForMultipleEvents() instead of WaitForMultipleEvents() (the other "easteregg"). Why the Cygwin people didn't figure this out baffles me. I guess their current code base doesn't allow the rewrite. My big breakthrough was when I realized that the "inconsistent interfaces" [1] in Win32 file handles can be implemented as virtual file systems. One for each handle type (char, disk, pipe, etc). That was my "throwing away 1000 lines of code" [2] moment.

As to the weird file names, I use the file names OpenBSD uses. My rule is to always use the file name of the header (.h) file where the system call is declared in OpenBSD. I also use their struct and constant names, prefixed with "WIN_".

The "fork is evil" thing is discussed a lot in the programmers community. I myself find it quite clever. Threads are highly volatile and are very hard to program without running into race conditions. The solution is to make a copy of everything the child will be using: duplicate file descriptors, the stack, globals (rss). The kernel does all this for you in one system call. I often wonder how the people who complain about the absence of real concurrency in their programming languages [3] actually would use this feature. In my opinion the best way to use concurrency is to string individual programs into a pipeline. This will never go "evil" on you.

[0] https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/highlights.html

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

[2] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/43800/did-the-c...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32408577