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Cygwin and Wine both are compatibility layers. One is implementing POSIX on Windows, and the other is implementing Windows API on *nix. Why is it necessary to recompile binaries to run on Windows with Cygwin, while you can run Windows applications using Wine without recompilation?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Oct 6 '12 at 10:04

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Because there is one Windows (albeit in different versions) on one platform (x86) but gazillions of *nixes (SysV, BSD, Linux, Dec, ...) multiplied by their platforms multiplied by their supported CPUs.

Sharing code on *nix was always sharing the source due to that variety.

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There isn't really a good answer to this question other than "they're different". It would, in theory, be possible to produce a Cygwin-like layer for *nix which would enable you to recompile Windows applications on *nix and a Wine-like layer for Windows which would enable you to run *nix applications without recompilation - but that isn't what people did.

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+1: If I have a Unix app I want to run on Windows, I can probably get the source code. That's very much not the case for a Windows app. Insisting on a recompile is probably easier, but if that was necessary for Wine, there would be very few apps that it could support. – me_and Oct 6 '12 at 17:09
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Winelib allows Windows applications to be compiled for Unix (with various limitations). – ak2 Oct 6 '12 at 18:04

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