I've been trying to understand what exactly Cygwin and MinGW are and find it very confusing. If you want to program in C++ don't you just need a C++ compiler? From what I've read it seems like they strive to provide a Unix like operating system on Windows but I don't see the significance of this. I mean is there some reason that C++ can't natively be compiled on Windows? I also read that they contain libraries, is this because the C++ core language doesn't support many functions so very common libraries such as math.h come with it?

c++ compilation cygwin mingw
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