Yeah, I thought that too, and said so in an article. It would be the clean, logical, elegant way to do it and inline with the history of NT.
I got angry denials from several Microsofties on Twitter!
It isn't at all.
WSL1 is an offshoot of the now-cancelled Android runtime for Windows.
They wanted to run Android's JVM/Dalvik apps on Windows Mobile... but discovered more and more native OS calls. So, they ended up implementing 90% of a Linux kernel emulator in userland.
Later, they made it standalone and complete enough to run a real Linux userland on top, and marketed it as a Linux runtime.
It is tragic to me that senior MS execs are now proud of this approach and scolded me for thinking otherwise.
My conclusion is that MS no longer has:
• Any kernel engineers who really understand how NT works deep down;
• Anyone skilled enough to modernise the NT kernel's POSIX personality to be Linux personality;
• Anyone in authority who realises it ought to have these things;
• Nobody left who feels shame at this.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-au/archive/blogs/wsl/pico-pro...
Unfortunately this was cripplingly slow for use in e.g. Git, so they moved to a model which is more of a VM.
Particularly for the more complex cases of container APIs, GPU access, desktop integration, etc. Those are solved problems in the VM space and reinventing new solutions at a slightly different layer is not necessarily wise or realistic.
For my use cases, I just want to target unix-like APIs and use bash-isms so I can reuse my build scripts and tooling. I don't really care if the binary format I consume or compile to is different to Linux - as long as my development experience is identical across MacOS, Windows and Linux.
A thin layer on top of Windows that mimics Linux so I can run bash _properly_ is all I really need.
The closest I've come is using Msys2 with zsh and uutils and it is so close but there are still cases where it simply doesn't work. WSL1 was pretty close but it falls short by needing remote development tools and having isolated storage/poor performance interacting with host storage.
WSL2 is DOA for me, I just hand roll my own Linux VM and call it a day.
For example, if you were a Unix archiver extracting a file, you'd call stat() open() write() close() chmod() utimes(). On Linux/BSD that's 1 file open/close, but on Windows, that's 4 file opens/closes because the Windows APIs need an open filehandle, while the POSIX APIs take a filepath. Linux/BSD have LRU caches of filepath->inode because they're designed around these APIs, Windows doesn't. Cygwin has to open/close a Windows filehandle each time because it can't make the calling code pass a filehandle instead.
So it may be more comfortable and familiar, but also Windows APIs are unsympathetic to code designed for Unix originally.
See this talk on how the developers of rustup massively improved their performance on Windows by restructuring their code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/i...
I know conventional VMs do this kind of thing too, but I've always found it more awkward to set it up, you have to install special tools or kernel modules, etc. With WSL it just works out of the box.
That has to be sarcasm, right?
Then again, I see WSL as a poor man's Linux ("poor man" being a developer in some enterprise who can't pick their tools freely due to some IT policy).
And while WSL is worse than Linux without Windows, I still prefer it over MacOS with Linux running in a VM.
The one exception: my God filesystem performance on WSL1 was ass, and not an easy problem to fix
Something like skeeto's w64devkit? https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit
This is a common confusion. WSL1 is not deprecated, and both WSL1 and WSL2 continue to be developed and supported in parallel by Microsoft.
This is example of bad Microsoft marketing. Maybe they should have added a postfixes instead of numbers: "WSL-native" "WSL-VM" or something like that
I have had a 'Softie deny, in person to my face at the Ubuntu Summit, that any further development would occur on WSL1, in 2022.
So I have to call [[citation needed]] on that.
The insurmountable problem was file system semantics. In Linux, files are dumb and fast. On Windows, files are smarter and therefore also slower. Linux applications expect dumb fast files and they produce a lot of them. Mapping Linux file system calls to Windows file system calls is doable but you can't overcome that difference.
At that point, simply virtualizing the Linux kernel itself is an obvious better solution long term.
Nah. It was fine.
Filesystem access was slow. That meant that Git was slow. And every Linux techie thinks they're the next Torvalds and hacks on code and uses Git, so Git needed to work well.
But it is the case that you can build a Windows application from source on Linux and link it with libwine, in the same way you can build a Unix program from source on Windows and link it with cygwin.dll -- I seem to remember some time ago CorelDRAW (or at least Corel Photo-Paint) was made available for Linux that way, officially supported by Corel.
MinGW is a GNU toolchain for writing Windows-native software... that happens to be used quite often to compile Unixy non-Windows software, so they added MSYS which is derived from Cygwin and works like Cygwin (a DLL providing POSIX APIs implemented using Windows APIs), to make it easier to compile and run Unixy software unmodified.
WSL is a VM that runs your choice of Linux kernel and distro as a guest OS, and adds integrations with the host system that make it seem much more native than it really is.