Live data from Hacker News

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

infoq.com

351–360 of 420 posts

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Integration is even tighter now its not just a VM like many commented here.

Can you write a single feature that's available in WSL 2 but not in VirtualBox?

Starts in one second.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has been my experience as well. WSL2 is much much faster.

Do you specifically mean \\wsl$ is much faster on WSL2?

  time grep -ri asfadsfadfg /home/me/python-venvs
  0.79s user
  0.14s system
  99% cpu
  0.928 total

  wsl time grep -ri asfadsfadfg /home/me/python-venvs
  0.83s user
  0.10s system
  99% cpu
  0.932 total
EDIT: cleaned up and formatted the output for better visibility, reacting to your comment.

First command ran from a zsh Terminal session in WSL

Second one ran from a powershell session using the wsl "bridge" executable.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#353
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what’s happening. Hyper-v is a type-1 hypervisor. When it’s running, even your Windows instance is running within hyper-v. Windows 10 has the hypervisor platform that lets other vm developers hook into the hyper-v host architecture, that’s how you can get android emulators and virtualbox running under hyper-v. It all works fine but is a little unintuitive to set up.

If both VirtualBox and VMware give up on Hyper-V coexistence, it must be a bit worse than "unintuitive".

They haven't given up.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you specifically mean \\wsl$ is much faster on WSL2?

time grep -ri asfadsfadfg /home/me/python-venvs 0.79s user 0.14s system 99% cpu 0.928 total wsl time grep -ri asfadsfadfg /home/me/python-venvs 0.83s user 0.10s system 99% cpu 0.932 total EDIT: cleaned up and formatted the output for better visibility, reacting to your comment. First command ran from a zsh Terminal session in WSL Second one ran from a powershell session using the wsl "bridge" executable.

I can't make sense of your command lines (why are you passing grep to grep??), but you're comparing pure-Windows against pure-WSL? I was comparing the two of those against \\wsl$ which is the slow one...

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#355
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just playing with the words here... It's the same as saying: " As a person who runs containers all the time, I really don't get Docker". The point is VS Code handles my code hosted in WSL 2 out of the box. I don't care that I could use a VM or a remote server instead. I just suggested that the parent commenter waits for is IDE to implement a similar integration...

Sorry, should have made my point more clear. VSCode made some unique design choices which enable them to support connecting to any Linux server, VM or not. In contrast, these design choices may not be possible for other IDEs. So, because WSL 2 is, effectively, a Linux VM, supporting it in editor is harder than supporting WSL 1. As for "I really don't get" part, I wanted to say that WSL 2 sounds like a regression to m…

No worries, thanks for taking the time to explain.

The software engineer in me agrees with you, WSL 1 was architecturally more ambitious than version 2.

As a user, I couldn't care less. I just hope Microsoft manages to create a good ecosystem around WSL.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If microsoft implemented the host side of virtio-fs then the guest could make use of that. Also, IO performance of WSL1 wasn't exactly great either compared to native linux filesystems.

Here's an excellent post by SvenGroot from MS with lots of background-info: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197#issuecomment-60...

The most useful bits are always buried deep down in the threads. Thanks for posting this.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#357

In WSL1, running "wsl git status" on a moderately sized repo on an NTFS (Windows side) drive or SMB file share is nearly instantaneous. In WSL2, running the same command takes over 30 seconds. WSL2 is a massive hit to the seemless experience between the two operating systems with filesystem performance from Linux to Windows files orders of magnitude worse. Yes, unzipping tarballs or manipulating and stat syscalls are…

So if accessing ntfs from wsl is now slow, you can put the files in wsl instead. The problem then, if you're using this as a dev machine, is how do you edit them in Windows? I want to use my JetBrains IDEs to edit wsl files, if that doesn't work I'd just stick with dual boot.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#358
post #67
post #59

I am giving up. WSL1 was a great invention but Microsoft gave up on it, either because of the filesystem performance problems or because of the debuggers. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2028 (lldb, rr, delve all affected). This looks like a dreaded case of the first 90% is easy, it's the second 90% that is hard. Imagine implementing a translator for a vast majority of Linux syscalls just to find certain flav…

WSL was very cool from a pure tech standpoint, but I've never been clear what the actual use case for it was. WSL2 seems to be more along the lines of coLinux, which I felt the same way about when it was new.

I basically do all of my js web development on WSL now.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#359
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just playing with the words here... It's the same as saying: " As a person who runs containers all the time, I really don't get Docker". The point is VS Code handles my code hosted in WSL 2 out of the box. I don't care that I could use a VM or a remote server instead. I just suggested that the parent commenter waits for is IDE to implement a similar integration...

Sorry, should have made my point more clear. VSCode made some unique design choices which enable them to support connecting to any Linux server, VM or not. In contrast, these design choices may not be possible for other IDEs. So, because WSL 2 is, effectively, a Linux VM, supporting it in editor is harder than supporting WSL 1. As for "I really don't get" part, I wanted to say that WSL 2 sounds like a regression to m…

Nit: WSL2 is available on Windows Home, while Hyper-V is reserved for Pro and up.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#360
post #326
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It kind of is, then again VSCode doesn't do even half of VS is capable of.

The two doesn't even play in the same category: "source code editor" vs full fledged IDE It doesn't make much sense to compare the two in general imho.

VSCode is truly a full-fledged IDE for TypeScript at least, and via plugins it can play the part for several other languages, including Rust. Mostly those depend on the quality of their Language Server implementations.
Post reply on HN