4 ms·

> Now what I don't get, and I'm not trolling here, is why would you want this? Isn't a VM a better option? If this is indeed close to native performance, you w

> Now what I don't get, and I'm not trolling here, is why would you want this? Isn't a VM a better option? If this is indeed close to native performance, you wouldn't get anywhere close to that with a VM. I could be oblivious to some optimization techniques but Linux VM's on Windows have always performed drastically worse than native.

temac 10y ago
In my experience it's quite the opposite for some workloads: Linux FS and process spawning speeds are typically way faster than Windows one (with or without WSL), so much that even when in a VM with dozen of % of overhead, it is still faster than running on Windows for some workloads (just cold open a random man page under WSL, compared to a VM, and you will understand how much Windows lag behind Linux in some areas -- next you can try to build a big program: same result: Windows is really slow) Now this does not render WSL useless; launch time for any random small tool is better with WSL than booting a complete VM, the memory is not partitioned, integration with the Windows Drive FS is slightly better, etc. But tons of use cases are better covered by a VM -- and with a huge margin.
- youdontknowtho 10y ago
  File System and process spawning...I'm not sure what you mean? When working in WSL? or natively in Windows?
- orf 10y ago
  > just cold open a random man page under WSL, compared to a VM, and you will understand how much Windows lag behind Linux in some areas -- next you can try to build a big program: same result: Windows is really slow) Mate, the thing isn't even released yet and you're bashing it (excuse the pun) for taking too long to open up a man page? Give me a break. After it's actually released and the performance gets better then it is of course going to trump running a whole VM and to suggest otherwise is just FUD, IMO.
  - xorblurb 10y ago
    RS1 is mostly frozen. I think Win10 is quite good, and that WSL is quite good given its age, and will be extremely useful for a lot of things. Still, if you try some workloads, WSL is way slower than a Linux VM. I don't expect it to change for the release. I don't even expect it to change for the 2 years to come. Sill, of course, I could be wrong. But even so; I insist: WSL is actually quite impressive.

temac 10y ago

In my experience it's quite the opposite for some workloads: Linux FS and process spawning speeds are typically way faster than Windows one (with or without WSL), so much that even when in a VM with dozen of % of overhead, it is still faster than running on Windows for some workloads (just cold open a random man page under WSL, compared to a VM, and you will understand how much Windows lag behind Linux in some areas -- next you can try to build a big program: same result: Windows is really slow) Now this does not render WSL useless; launch time for any random small tool is better with WSL than booting a complete VM, the memory is not partitioned, integration with the Windows Drive FS is slightly better, etc. But tons of use cases are better covered by a VM -- and with a huge margin.

youdontknowtho 10y ago
File System and process spawning...I'm not sure what you mean? When working in WSL? or natively in Windows?
orf 10y ago
> just cold open a random man page under WSL, compared to a VM, and you will understand how much Windows lag behind Linux in some areas -- next you can try to build a big program: same result: Windows is really slow) Mate, the thing isn't even released yet and you're bashing it (excuse the pun) for taking too long to open up a man page? Give me a break. After it's actually released and the performance gets better then it is of course going to trump running a whole VM and to suggest otherwise is just FUD, IMO.
- xorblurb 10y ago
  RS1 is mostly frozen. I think Win10 is quite good, and that WSL is quite good given its age, and will be extremely useful for a lot of things. Still, if you try some workloads, WSL is way slower than a Linux VM. I don't expect it to change for the release. I don't even expect it to change for the 2 years to come. Sill, of course, I could be wrong. But even so; I insist: WSL is actually quite impressive.