Microsoft added support for symbolic links long time ago, but required administrative rights to create them, which makes symbolic links mostly useless outside tightly controlled environments like install/setup.
On Windows 10, by enabling Developer Mode in Settings, it is possible to create symlinks without administrative rights.
Starting processes via symbolic links is possible in Command Prompt.
However there are some differences, since executables accompanied by DLLs fail to find them.
Also make is not able to start the compiler properly:
C:\Users\ilg\tmp\xp\build\xp-hifive1-riscv-none-gcc-debug>make all
[riscv-none-embed-gcc]: src/newlib-syscalls.c
riscv-none-embed-gcc: error: CreateProcess: No such file or directory
make: *** [src/subdir.mk:15: src/newlib-syscalls.o] Error 1Otherwise xpm is capable of starting programs (like make and riscv-none-embed-gcc) via links.
TODO: investigate why make fails to start processes via symlinks.
Without symbolic links, the traditional workaround is to use shims, small shell scripts that start the program from the original location, usually relative to the shim location.
For use with the Microsoft shell, the files should be named xxx.cmd; for POSIX environments (like mingw/cygwin), the files are regular shell scripts and need no extension.
However this solution works only for executable files; other types (like DLLs) cannot be linked.
Folders can be 'junctioned' and apparently this is transparent.
Other special cases worth mentioning is make. If make finds a sh.exe, it uses the POSIX shim, otherwise it uses cmd.exe which will pick the .cmd shim.
The most annoying issue is that using shims apparently confuses the binaries about their real location.
One possible workaround is to also copy the DLLs and the sh.exe to the new destination folder. This has the disadvantage of version clashes between DLLs contributed by different packages.
A better option is to start each executable in an environment which includes its parent folder in the PATH. This helps identify both the local DLLs and the sh.exe. Apparently there are no drawbacks.
Anyway, on Windows, even in Developer mode, symbolic links are mostly useless.