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MSYS2 provides a large collection of packages containing such software, and libraries for their development. As a large portion of the software uses GNU build tools which are tightly coupled to the unix world, this environment is also POSIX-compatible, and is in fact based on Cygwin.
MSYS2 is software distribution and a building platform for Windows. It provides a Unix-like environment, a command-line interface and a software repository making it easier to install, use, build and port software on Windows.
MINGW refers to executables that are compiled using the MINGW GCC Compiler and target the Win32 API. MSYS2 refers to executables that are compiled by MSYS2 GCC Compiler and make use of a POSIX emulation layer.
MinGW is higher performance than Cygwin, but it's also 32-bit which may be a problem with your applications. There is a 64-bit environment similar to MinGW but it's a different project. MinGW-w64 is in all senses the successor to MinGW.
Traditionally MSYS bash has been inferior, but mostly because Cygwin remained under active development whereas MSYS didn't. MSYS forked from Cygwin version 1.3.3 and never re-synced, whereas MSYS2 resyncs with the Cygwin project regularly.
We don't have a "sweet pacman like package manager", we have as direct a re-compilation of Arch Linux's pacman package manager as we could achieve.
MSYS2 doesn't have cygwin.dll but it does have msys-2.0.dll which does the same thing (and some more besides). Specifically, arguments that look like paths and the PATH env. var are converted to Windows form when running Windows-native software.
As for whether it's slower, I expect there'd be very little difference but MSYS2 would be a tiny amount slower due to the extra conversion work. Then again, chances are you'll run more Windows-native software from within MSYS2 (such as MinGW-w64 compilers) than you would from Cygwin so that'll shift things back in MSYS2's favour.
As well as I understand, MSYS2 is a fork of Cygwin with main goal to provide possibility to use MinGW-w64 packages. That goal is achieved at expense of total number of available software. Compare list of that of MSYS2 and Cygwin.
Essentially, that’s all. So while you did not need to compile something under MinGW-w64, you would hardly have any reason to use MSYS2 rather than original Cygwin.
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