It is a Hyper-V backed VA backed VM. It shared memory with the host in the same fashion that WSL does, as opposed to carving out physical memory. We have some additional optimizations to make it snappier than running a full vm.

This seems to run more seamlessly than a virtual machine. Plus I think this supports hardware acceleration and stuff natively.

In fairness, setting up and maintaining a virtual machine might as well be too much upkeep for the common user.

On the other hand, if a user knows what a "sandbox" is (no, not the playground box of sand) they aren't a common user.

It uses hardware-isolation which i think is more secure.