Cygwin as native 64-bit in the future? [closed]

Question

Does anyone know if there will ever be a true 64-bit version of Cygwin? The FAQ says "as far as we know nobody is working on a 64-bit version" or something like that. Is cygwin forever to be a 32-bit application (or family of apps if you prefer)?

A 64-bit version would be nice. For the most part I can do what I need with the 32-bit version of cygwin on 64-bit windows. But every now and then a 64-bit program I launch from cygwin will recognize the fact that it was launched by a 32-bit parent and behave incorrectly, or not run at all. I must open a cmd.exe or powershell session to run these few commands. One example you can reproduce for yourelf on Windows 2003 64-bit with IIS installed is to run the following command from cygwin then from a cmd.exe that was not opened from within cygwin. (Double backslashes obviously aren't necessary in cmd.exe, but they work ok in both shells.)

cscript c:\\windows\\system32\\iisApp.vbs

So, I can live with opening a cmd.exe session when I need to run something that behaves this way. But being a huge fan of Cygwin I would really like to see an indication that someday someone will produce a 64-bit version.

Answer 1

Probably coincidence, but shortly after this question was posted, there was a large thread with the Cygwin developers discussing 64-bit here:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.cygwin.devel/233/focus=247

TL;DR - They are in fact thinking about 64-bit Cygwin, but the porting issues are complex...

Answer 2

You'll need to see a clairvoyant to get a defininitive answer to your question, but here goes anyway.

A 64-bit Cygwin is certainly possible, but it would require a lot of work. That involves not only adapting the Cygwin DLL, which probably contains many 32-bit assumptions, but also the porting of all the packages in the distro. My guess is that this will happen when 64-bit Windows becomes so widespread that developing the 32-bit version is no longer worthwhile, so as to avoid splitting the Cygwin project's rather limited resources.