MSYS Alternatives
MSYS is described as 'collection of GNU utilities such as bash, make, gawk and grep to allow building of applications and programs which depend on traditionally UNIX tools to be present' and is an app in the os & utilities category. There are four alternatives to MSYS for Windows, BSD and Linux. The best alternative is Cygwin, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like MSYS are MinGW, MSYS2 and MinGW-w64.
Cygwin is a Unix-like environment and command-line interface for Microsoft Windows. Cygwin provides native integration of Windows-based applications, data, and other system resources with applications, software tools, and data of the Unix-like environment.
MinGW ("Minimalistic GNU for Windows") is a port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and GNU Binutils. It provides a complete Open Source programming toolset which is suitable for the development of native MS-Windows (x86) applications, which do not depend on any...
MSYS2 is an independent rewrite of MSYS, based on modern Cygwin (POSIX compatibility layer) and MinGW-w64 with the aim of better interoperability with native Windows software.
The project's goal is to deliver runtime, headers, and libs for developing 64 bit (x64), as well as 32 bit (x86), windows applications using gcc-4.4 or newer versions.