17 ms·

OT: I must agree about your comparison of macOS and Windows. IMO Microsoft is doing a lot to improve the developer experience. WSL2 is so freaking good. It has

by bezout 6y ago

OT: I must agree about your comparison of macOS and Windows. IMO Microsoft is doing a lot to improve the developer experience. WSL2 is so freaking good. It has its quirks and it has issues with some workflows, but I’m thinking about moving out of macOS after having tried it. Apple may have the fastest processor, but Microsoft has the most comfortable tools. Both companies are not perfect, but if we must choose the lesser evil...

seertaak 6y ago
Indeed, WSL2 is pretty cool. Also, Windows Terminal is actually pretty sweet, and I even gave PowerShell a spin the other day. The crazy thing is you can basically use it as a bash shell, and it gets the job done. My developer experience right now consists of PowerShell, where I do all my regular directory jumping, editing (vim), etc., and a Developer Shell with god awful classic "terminal" which I only use to call conan/cmake/clang-windows. I have to add the following: MSVC supports clang on windows. And CMake - all within Visual Studio. And it works perfectly, with perfect support for C++17. Badass.
- jolux 6y ago
  Visual Studio has supported Developer PowerShell for a while now, and it’s possible to load it into Windows Terminal. It’s just a set of arguments. This blog post explains them: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/say-hello-to-the-new-visual-studio-terminal/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/say-hello-to-the...
- atonse 6y ago
  MS has always been solid with developer tools, documentation, and dev relations. Even though I prefer administering Linux servers any day over Windows servers, I find myself often missing PowerShell when I use bash. It has some quirks but some of the design decisions are exactly what you'd hope someone would make if they redesigned a command-line shell 40 years later. I still find it comical that we proudly paste around commands that just wrangle text no differently from what perl programmers did in the 90s, using sed, print, cut, etc, when things like PowerShell moved to piping objects between commands. It just removes a whole class of ambiguity.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    > 90s The paradigm of sending text in and out of pipes is ~20 years older than that.
    - atonse 6y ago
      I had actually written an earlier date but then I realized I was talking about Perl :) I think perl was created in the early 90s, correct?
      - to11mtm 6y ago
        I believe the annals of history say 87 [0] "1987 - Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall's forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall's monitor isn't random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born." [0] - http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...
        boogies 6y ago
        +1 for linking such beautiful annals
      - 908B64B197 6y ago
        I misunderstood your post. You are 100% correct about perl. I understood it as 'shell computing with stdin and stdout streams of characters' instead of structured data coming in and going out.
  - blibble 6y ago
    > MS has always been solid with developer tools, documentation, and dev relations. in my 25 years of using their tooling and reading their documentation, they've never been more than what just qualifies as borderline acceptable I booted up VS2019 today for the first time in a while (after waiting 90 minutes for it to install) and it still feels like using a Jetbrains IDE from 15 years ago, and it's still worse than what Borland produced in the 90s ... and it's even slower than IntelliJ IDEA, which just seems amazing as IDEA is written in Java
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  Wait until you find out CygWin is a thing for decades and you could've used Linux style under Windows all this time
  - naikrovek 6y ago
    Not at all the same. Not at all.
    - girvo 6y ago
      I mean sure it’s not, but back in the late 2000s I did everything under it and it made for a great experience. It’s little package manager was handy, everything I needed was there, it worked surprisingly well.
      - 40four 6y ago
        I agree. I recently bailed on WSL because my poor crappy laptop was buckling under the weight of the extra resource demand. I’m not using Cygwin, but similarly, I decided to trick out my git bash with extra packages from MSYS2. I have all the Linux tools I need, been having a great experience with it. The amount of resources it takes to run WSL, or a virtual box on older hardware can be devastating. You don’t hear this mentioned much.
        naikrovek 6y ago
        WSL1 doesn't use a virtual machine, and only implements Linux syscalls as NT kernel syscalls. There's no VM or OS overhead; WSL1 is 100% userland software, except for the kernel translation stuff. You should not have any issues with WSL1 in terms of system load or "weight" (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean in computer terms. This is used all the time and I've never once seen a definition for it. What is the unit of measurement? What's the border between "lightweight" and "not lightweight?" This industry as a whole ingests far too many hallucinogens. )
    - heresie-dabord 6y ago
- jhoechtl 6y ago
  What is windows terminal? cmd?
  - bhauer 6y ago
    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/
    - wayne 6y ago
      With its own commercial! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gw0rXPMMPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gw0rXPMMPE
  - Kwpolska 6y ago
    No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Terminal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Terminal
  - mmgutz 6y ago
    It's like the the terminals found on Linux. I would give it a recommendation but I still encounter issues with tmux session and mouse (yes I have the latest from github installed). I recommend the terminal in VSCode which works as expected with ssh + tmux.
- lokedhs 6y ago
  Windows Terminal is very difficult to work with if one has astigmatism that prevents working with dark background. I don't usually use Windows, so perhaps I didn't spend enough time on it, but I was unable to create a colourmap with white background that didn't look horrible with some software. No matter how much I changed the colours, there was always some combination that gave me light grey on white or something like that. If anyone has a colourmap I can use, that would be really appreciated.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bezout 6y ago
    I guess it depends. I use the Windows Terminal, and I have high astigmatism and myopia. I find it very readable using the Cascadia Code font. Btw I agree about dark backgrounds being less readable but I can’t get away with light backgrounds because of eye floaters.
  - Kipters 6y ago
    I'm astigmatic but I never noticed any issue with dark backgrounds, not only in Windows Terminal, I didn't know it could happen
    - lokedhs 6y ago
      I don't think it happens to everybody with astigmatism. I cannot read any text with black background. After a very short amount of time I'm unable to read anything, and once I take my eyes off the screen it feels as though I've been staring into the sun. There used to be a great Firefox plugin that allowed me to change the colours of web pages that use black background, but it doesn't work anymore, and I haven't found a good replacement.
      - prionassembly 6y ago
        This has to do with screen glare. A matte screen might treat you better.
TheOperator 6y ago
Buying Microsoft for it's OS and Apple for it's hardware? What is this opposite day?
chx 6y ago
> WSL2 is so freaking good. I am on WSL1 two things hold me back from upgrading 1. How's networking? I go on and off VPNs quite a bit. 2. How's cross system access to files especially performance wise? I edit with phpstorm for windows, I share the files with Slack also windows, I access the same files with WSL git, LAMP stack and more.
- kyriakos 6y ago
  1. Just works. Only issue I found is that Wsl2 will not update its dns resolver IPs when connecting to the vpn. There's a workaround script. So it's either exit the terminal and re enter it or run the script to update them. 2. This is my current pain. Windows file system is slow already and accessing it from wsl adds an overhead. Ideally I keep projects in Wsl2 storage and IDEs in Windows. I searched a lot for a solution but haven't found one. On the other hand, Wsl2 Linux storage speed runs circles around wsl1.
  - peschkaj 6y ago
    I use X410 and run tools from inside of WSL2 by exporting the display. Works well for Emacs, JetBrains Rider, and every other GUI application I've tried so far.
    - naikrovek 6y ago
      Concur. X410 is great and survives where xming and vcxsrv both crash for me. It's not free but the "not crashing" feature makes it well worth the $10 I paid for it.
    - girvo 6y ago
      That sounds excellent: I’ll have to give it a shot. VSCode under WSL2 with its Docker support is neat, but can be slow due to the storage system overhead. This might solve that for my team!
  - mynameisash 6y ago
    I never had an issue with WSL1 until some bizarre bug that cropped up seemingly out of nowhere in which I would blue-screen during some Rust compilation. I didn't have the issue after maybe four or six months of using Rust in WSL1 until suddenly I did. Upgrading to WSL2 fixed the problem. Publishing Rust crates does require a workaround[0] in WSL2 if it's from a Windows directory. That's annoying but pretty infrequent (for me) and not a difficult workaround. Except for those two issues, I've not had any problems in either WSL version - certainly nothing that would give me pause to using either one. [0] https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/8439#issuecomment-660310563 https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/8439#issuecomment-...
hctaw 6y ago
> Apple may have the fastest processor, but Microsoft has the most comfortable tools. It doesn't matter how fast the M1 is if XCode can't keep up with modern development tools. I don't understand how Apple developers produce any software with it, the experience is truly awful compared to nearly every alternative. It's slow, buggy and inscrutable. How long does it take to onboard a fresh grad at Apple, I wonder?
- kenjackson 6y ago
  I have an existing app in Swift and Interface Builder. I hate xCode. Simple things like deploying the app to a device is hit or miss (usually miss). Is there a development environment that I could use for my app which is better? Happy to use any platform (MacOS, Linux, Windows).
  - hctaw 6y ago
    App Code is probably the only thing worth checking out. Swift isn't a useful language outside of the Apple ecosystem and interface builders come and go, usually go (design in Figma/Adobe products, implement in Code rather than UI wysiwyg)
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  I think IDEs may be a bit more subjective than are often presented. Personally speaking, my experience with Xcode has been just ok (not amazing) while IntelliJ based IDEs have been clunky and arcane, with some of their "smarts" functioning in ways that aren't expected or intuitive at all. Both are functional if you let me pick which to spend a work day in, it'd probably be Xcode. What one is first exposed to and how they're exposed to it probably makes a big difference.
cpeth 6y ago
"Apple may have the fastest processor, but Microsoft has the most comfortable tools. Both companies are not perfect, but if we must choose the lesser evil..." It's very fast for a low power, laptop-focused processor and even then only truly excels at single-threaded workloads. It's out classed by AMD mobile offerings (4900HS and 4800U) in multi-threaded workloads on most tests[0]. If you step up to desktop processors, the top end processors like the AMD 5950X are in a different class of multi-threaded performance. Don't get me wrong, it's an exceptional processor and incredibly fast for its sub-25W TDP. [0] - https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
- caycep 6y ago
  This is simply a matter of adding more cores...I mean, I would hope the 5950x with its 16 full strength cores would be better than an M1 with it's big/little design...
  - phendrenad2 6y ago
    I don't think it's as simple as adding more cores. Maybe the M1 doesn't scale up nicely.
    - MBCook 6y ago
      We’ll find out this year.
    - SekstiNi 6y ago
      Looking at the die shot [1], they have plenty of space for cores and cache if they remove the GPU. Surely it's not that simple, but I believe they should be able scale to at least 8+4 cores without large interconnect changes, and at that point they are already knocking on the 5900X's door. [1] - https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/M1.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/M1.png
      - NewLogic 6y ago
jhoechtl 6y ago
Unleash all your handcuffs and move directly to Linux. It will be really refreshing!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vijaybritto 6y ago
Please know that networking in WSL2 is a nightmare if working in a VPN. We are currently staying in WSL1 because the internet wont work in WSL2 under the corporate VPN.
- bezout 6y ago
  Did you try this https://esc.sh/blog/wsl2-no-internet-vpn/ https://esc.sh/blog/wsl2-no-internet-vpn/?
- baq 6y ago
  cisco anyconnect is notorious for that. you have to bump its interface metric above a certain value so WSL2 network or whatever does the routing can do its work.

by bezout 6y ago

seertaak 6y ago

Indeed, WSL2 is pretty cool. Also, Windows Terminal is actually pretty sweet, and I even gave PowerShell a spin the other day. The crazy thing is you can basically use it as a bash shell, and it gets the job done. My developer experience right now consists of PowerShell, where I do all my regular directory jumping, editing (vim), etc., and a Developer Shell with god awful classic "terminal" which I only use to call conan/cmake/clang-windows. I have to add the following: MSVC supports clang on windows. And CMake - all within Visual Studio. And it works perfectly, with perfect support for C++17. Badass.

jolux 6y ago
Visual Studio has supported Developer PowerShell for a while now, and it’s possible to load it into Windows Terminal. It’s just a set of arguments. This blog post explains them: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/say-hello-to-the-new-visual-studio-terminal/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/say-hello-to-the...
atonse 6y ago
MS has always been solid with developer tools, documentation, and dev relations. Even though I prefer administering Linux servers any day over Windows servers, I find myself often missing PowerShell when I use bash. It has some quirks but some of the design decisions are exactly what you'd hope someone would make if they redesigned a command-line shell 40 years later. I still find it comical that we proudly paste around commands that just wrangle text no differently from what perl programmers did in the 90s, using sed, print, cut, etc, when things like PowerShell moved to piping objects between commands. It just removes a whole class of ambiguity.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > 90s The paradigm of sending text in and out of pipes is ~20 years older than that.
  - atonse 6y ago
    I had actually written an earlier date but then I realized I was talking about Perl :) I think perl was created in the early 90s, correct?
    - to11mtm 6y ago
      I believe the annals of history say 87 [0] "1987 - Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall's forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall's monitor isn't random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born." [0] - http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...
      - boogies 6y ago
        +1 for linking such beautiful annals
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      I misunderstood your post. You are 100% correct about perl. I understood it as 'shell computing with stdin and stdout streams of characters' instead of structured data coming in and going out.
- blibble 6y ago
  > MS has always been solid with developer tools, documentation, and dev relations. in my 25 years of using their tooling and reading their documentation, they've never been more than what just qualifies as borderline acceptable I booted up VS2019 today for the first time in a while (after waiting 90 minutes for it to install) and it still feels like using a Jetbrains IDE from 15 years ago, and it's still worse than what Borland produced in the 90s ... and it's even slower than IntelliJ IDEA, which just seems amazing as IDEA is written in Java
unnouinceput 6y ago
Wait until you find out CygWin is a thing for decades and you could've used Linux style under Windows all this time
- naikrovek 6y ago
  Not at all the same. Not at all.
  - girvo 6y ago
    I mean sure it’s not, but back in the late 2000s I did everything under it and it made for a great experience. It’s little package manager was handy, everything I needed was there, it worked surprisingly well.
    - 40four 6y ago
      I agree. I recently bailed on WSL because my poor crappy laptop was buckling under the weight of the extra resource demand. I’m not using Cygwin, but similarly, I decided to trick out my git bash with extra packages from MSYS2. I have all the Linux tools I need, been having a great experience with it. The amount of resources it takes to run WSL, or a virtual box on older hardware can be devastating. You don’t hear this mentioned much.
      - naikrovek 6y ago
        WSL1 doesn't use a virtual machine, and only implements Linux syscalls as NT kernel syscalls. There's no VM or OS overhead; WSL1 is 100% userland software, except for the kernel translation stuff. You should not have any issues with WSL1 in terms of system load or "weight" (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean in computer terms. This is used all the time and I've never once seen a definition for it. What is the unit of measurement? What's the border between "lightweight" and "not lightweight?" This industry as a whole ingests far too many hallucinogens. )
  - heresie-dabord 6y ago
jhoechtl 6y ago
What is windows terminal? cmd?
- bhauer 6y ago
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/
  - wayne 6y ago
    With its own commercial! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gw0rXPMMPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gw0rXPMMPE
- Kwpolska 6y ago
  No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Terminal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Terminal
- mmgutz 6y ago
  It's like the the terminals found on Linux. I would give it a recommendation but I still encounter issues with tmux session and mouse (yes I have the latest from github installed). I recommend the terminal in VSCode which works as expected with ssh + tmux.
lokedhs 6y ago
Windows Terminal is very difficult to work with if one has astigmatism that prevents working with dark background. I don't usually use Windows, so perhaps I didn't spend enough time on it, but I was unable to create a colourmap with white background that didn't look horrible with some software. No matter how much I changed the colours, there was always some combination that gave me light grey on white or something like that. If anyone has a colourmap I can use, that would be really appreciated.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bezout 6y ago
  I guess it depends. I use the Windows Terminal, and I have high astigmatism and myopia. I find it very readable using the Cascadia Code font. Btw I agree about dark backgrounds being less readable but I can’t get away with light backgrounds because of eye floaters.
- Kipters 6y ago
  I'm astigmatic but I never noticed any issue with dark backgrounds, not only in Windows Terminal, I didn't know it could happen
  - lokedhs 6y ago
    I don't think it happens to everybody with astigmatism. I cannot read any text with black background. After a very short amount of time I'm unable to read anything, and once I take my eyes off the screen it feels as though I've been staring into the sun. There used to be a great Firefox plugin that allowed me to change the colours of web pages that use black background, but it doesn't work anymore, and I haven't found a good replacement.
    - prionassembly 6y ago
      This has to do with screen glare. A matte screen might treat you better.

TheOperator 6y ago

Buying Microsoft for it's OS and Apple for it's hardware? What is this opposite day?

chx 6y ago

> WSL2 is so freaking good. I am on WSL1 two things hold me back from upgrading 1. How's networking? I go on and off VPNs quite a bit. 2. How's cross system access to files especially performance wise? I edit with phpstorm for windows, I share the files with Slack also windows, I access the same files with WSL git, LAMP stack and more.

kyriakos 6y ago
1. Just works. Only issue I found is that Wsl2 will not update its dns resolver IPs when connecting to the vpn. There's a workaround script. So it's either exit the terminal and re enter it or run the script to update them. 2. This is my current pain. Windows file system is slow already and accessing it from wsl adds an overhead. Ideally I keep projects in Wsl2 storage and IDEs in Windows. I searched a lot for a solution but haven't found one. On the other hand, Wsl2 Linux storage speed runs circles around wsl1.
- peschkaj 6y ago
  I use X410 and run tools from inside of WSL2 by exporting the display. Works well for Emacs, JetBrains Rider, and every other GUI application I've tried so far.
  - naikrovek 6y ago
    Concur. X410 is great and survives where xming and vcxsrv both crash for me. It's not free but the "not crashing" feature makes it well worth the $10 I paid for it.
  - girvo 6y ago
    That sounds excellent: I’ll have to give it a shot. VSCode under WSL2 with its Docker support is neat, but can be slow due to the storage system overhead. This might solve that for my team!
- mynameisash 6y ago
  I never had an issue with WSL1 until some bizarre bug that cropped up seemingly out of nowhere in which I would blue-screen during some Rust compilation. I didn't have the issue after maybe four or six months of using Rust in WSL1 until suddenly I did. Upgrading to WSL2 fixed the problem. Publishing Rust crates does require a workaround[0] in WSL2 if it's from a Windows directory. That's annoying but pretty infrequent (for me) and not a difficult workaround. Except for those two issues, I've not had any problems in either WSL version - certainly nothing that would give me pause to using either one. [0] https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/8439#issuecomment-660310563 https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/8439#issuecomment-...

hctaw 6y ago

> Apple may have the fastest processor, but Microsoft has the most comfortable tools. It doesn't matter how fast the M1 is if XCode can't keep up with modern development tools. I don't understand how Apple developers produce any software with it, the experience is truly awful compared to nearly every alternative. It's slow, buggy and inscrutable. How long does it take to onboard a fresh grad at Apple, I wonder?

kenjackson 6y ago
I have an existing app in Swift and Interface Builder. I hate xCode. Simple things like deploying the app to a device is hit or miss (usually miss). Is there a development environment that I could use for my app which is better? Happy to use any platform (MacOS, Linux, Windows).
- hctaw 6y ago
  App Code is probably the only thing worth checking out. Swift isn't a useful language outside of the Apple ecosystem and interface builders come and go, usually go (design in Figma/Adobe products, implement in Code rather than UI wysiwyg)
kitsunesoba 6y ago
I think IDEs may be a bit more subjective than are often presented. Personally speaking, my experience with Xcode has been just ok (not amazing) while IntelliJ based IDEs have been clunky and arcane, with some of their "smarts" functioning in ways that aren't expected or intuitive at all. Both are functional if you let me pick which to spend a work day in, it'd probably be Xcode. What one is first exposed to and how they're exposed to it probably makes a big difference.

cpeth 6y ago

"Apple may have the fastest processor, but Microsoft has the most comfortable tools. Both companies are not perfect, but if we must choose the lesser evil..." It's very fast for a low power, laptop-focused processor and even then only truly excels at single-threaded workloads. It's out classed by AMD mobile offerings (4900HS and 4800U) in multi-threaded workloads on most tests[0]. If you step up to desktop processors, the top end processors like the AMD 5950X are in a different class of multi-threaded performance. Don't get me wrong, it's an exceptional processor and incredibly fast for its sub-25W TDP. [0] - https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

caycep 6y ago
This is simply a matter of adding more cores...I mean, I would hope the 5950x with its 16 full strength cores would be better than an M1 with it's big/little design...
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  I don't think it's as simple as adding more cores. Maybe the M1 doesn't scale up nicely.
  - MBCook 6y ago
    We’ll find out this year.
  - SekstiNi 6y ago
    Looking at the die shot [1], they have plenty of space for cores and cache if they remove the GPU. Surely it's not that simple, but I believe they should be able scale to at least 8+4 cores without large interconnect changes, and at that point they are already knocking on the 5900X's door. [1] - https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/M1.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16226/M1.png
    - NewLogic 6y ago

jhoechtl 6y ago

Unleash all your handcuffs and move directly to Linux. It will be really refreshing!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

vijaybritto 6y ago

Please know that networking in WSL2 is a nightmare if working in a VPN. We are currently staying in WSL1 because the internet wont work in WSL2 under the corporate VPN.

bezout 6y ago
Did you try this https://esc.sh/blog/wsl2-no-internet-vpn/ https://esc.sh/blog/wsl2-no-internet-vpn/?
baq 6y ago
cisco anyconnect is notorious for that. you have to bump its interface metric above a certain value so WSL2 network or whatever does the routing can do its work.