#2675
MinGW (formerly mingw32, short for Minimalist GNU for Window) is a minimalist free, open source and the most important, pretty darned good compiler for Windows application development using C/C++.

#2580
For beginners using Windows who are interested in the C/C++ language (anyway, you need to compile your C/C++ programs) or Linux embedded system development, the big headache is switching back and forth between Windows & Linux. Even you have to continuously reboot system in order to achieve the purpose, very troublesome. Cygwin just solved this problem.