2. Is there anything (apart from cross-compiling on Linux :) ) that can
be done to increase script execution speed?
You can try mounting your /usr/bin as cygexec. The manpage for mount
has some information. From my understanding, the way this works is that
when a Cygwin process goes to execute a binary, it checks the mount
table. If that binary is mounted on a path that is marked "cygexec" it
assumes that it is a Cygwin binary and skips a bit of the normal
song-and-dance, because it knows that it can just communicate directly
with the child process via the Cygwin shared memory area after the
process has started. I'm not entirely sure of how much of a speedup can
be expected, or whether it's significant or not, but it's worth testing.