Parity is a utility to compile native Windows executables and shared libraries using the Visual Studio compiler, from within a POSIX build environment like Cygwin, providing a GCC like frontend, plus some runtime functions known from the POSIX world. Beyond that, the native Win32 programs built with parity are potentially able to deal with POSIX style path names.
Older versions of this project can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/parity/