On: Cygwin 3.0.0-1

[kazinator]

MinGW has a fork function?

Maybe that newer MinGW-W64 project or whatever it is called.

The original MinGW that just links programs to the system library called MSVCRT.DLL.

It provides POSIX porting only the extent of the meagre support for a few POSIX functions in MSVCRT.DLL. That has things like open, read and dup2, and a half-baked stat and such.

[rurban → kazinator]

No, only cygwin (and WSL) can emulate fork, mingw needs the slower spawn, without COW. Or mingw programs emulate fork via threads.