Does anyone use gcc and cygwin and is it worth the trouble?
If your code uses POSIX, then you need a POSIX subsystem for Windows. I don't know what the current state of Windows and POSIX is, it may only be available on servers now.
So if you need POSIX and it is not available on your windows system, cygwin is worth it. ... I think.
Cygwin depends at LEAST on cygwin1.dll, and there's no static library. If you don't depend on the Unix emultation, you can pass -mno-cygwin to the compiler and it'll use the Windows runtime instead of the cygwin one but it only works if you don't use the Unix emulation.