would be thrilled to see gcc/mingw-gcc support on windows nvcc.
the dependency on VS creates a lot of challenges and extra works for software deployment, making automated building/testing and continuous integration (such as travis-ci) slow and inefficient. it also prevents the software from utilizing many of the open-source libraries, such as zlib (one has to manually build/add to path - can do it myself, but hard to instruct all users to do the same) and many other widely used libraries that are tightly integrated with msys2/cygwin64.
on Linux, nvcc has already been calling gcc on the host, not sure what makes it so different on Windows.