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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr: WINE can be considered to be more like an API translator. The opposite is also possible (Linux binaries on Windows), the most recent attempt being WSL from Microsoft itself, but there were a few other attempts before that: http://cowlark.com/lbw/index.html is one example I just found.

...and as an aside, the comments about the alcoholic beverage really suggest that they should've kept it named WINE (all uppercase).

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> the most recent attempt being WSL from Microsoft itself

Worth noting that this only applies to WSL1; WSL2 works in a completely different way.

Do you have a good writeup of how WSL2 works?

It’s a vm running full blown Linux. Just tightly integrated into windows.

Still a bit sad that Microsoft went the hypervisor way with WSL2, rather than the Windows Subsystem way in WSL1. It makes perfect sense that they did, but I'm still a bit sad.

Same. Though the use of 9P protocol in WSL2 to access the host filesystem was interesting

I'm curious why it makes you sad?

I was very glad when they announced WSL2 and while still using WSL1 for running socat for port forwarding, not missing it lack of further development much. Could be I'm missing some productivity stuff there?

Nothing from a productivity standpoint, I just find the idea of Windows NT subsystems cool as hell.

aha, got it ;)

There's a big wine glass on the project's website. I don't get the impression the association bothers them.

I think GP just meant that it can be ambiguous which one is meant (especially in the context of headlines like this); I'd imagine that even if it were always cased WINE it would still be pretty easily associated with the drink.

The only annoying part of the name is getting beverage-related search results when looking up error messages; but upper-casing it would probably not help much there.

Then they should have renamed it to LPWINEEX to give the name the full WINAPI treatment.

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