Hacker News Reader

Comment by cdud3 | Hacker News Reader

And yet it's still factors faster without a whole Windows around it.

There’s always going to be a tradeoff with usability. Even on Linux you’ll run containers or VMs to prepare your developer environment (servers aren’t running Arch).

You’d be impressed by how fast WSL runs. I’ve got other optimizations on the blog for even more performance tuning with pretty massive 2x-5x gains.

While every few weeks we read about "some more factors performance improvements is being worked on" we know how the current state looks like. Let's wait till we are talking about single digit percentage of improvements being worked on and newsworthy.

can you be more specific about your complaint?

Unfortunately that acquisition option isn't available in most physical stores, where normies buy their computers, even though there isn't a single OEM not running some distro on their data centers.

You can get a refund for that useless Windows licence but that is a bridge too far for most "normies" whether they buy their computers in brick-and-mortar stores or online. If that process could be streamlined somehow..

everything I use it for executes virtually instantly, 60% slower than virtually instantly is still virtually instantly.

If something is slow on WSL, but not on bare metal linux, it means that the application is slop that only works when MAXING OUT your CPU, it's slop, the app is the slop

Most of the overhead in virtualisation of the sort used by WSL2+ is not CPU throughput, but other hardware access (mostly IO, but for GUI apps display access can have a significant penalty). Things that are just spinning a couple of CPU cores doing number-crunching work and similar see significantly less penalty in VMs than those that perform much IO, unless of course there is much competition for host resources or for some other reason they get passed around cores so see many more L1 cache & TLB misses.

Some things need to max out the CPU, certain compile steps for instance, that is not slop that is code doing its job. Others need significant IO, often random IO, certain other compile/link steps for example, that is not slop. Sometimes if you knew your code was likely to be run in a VM rather than on bare metal you might design it slightly differently to reduce its sensitivity to the detrimental effects, but not having done so doesn't make your code slop. There might be some room to blame slop for UI slowness as a lot of code out there updates their display in an in inefficient manner that is actually noticeable on bare metal too, especially when it unnecessarily uses 3D accelerated compositing or similar and something causes that to fall back to software rendering, but even then if it works well enough in the intended environment calling it slop is perhaps unfair.

Yeah, I haven't dual booted in decades, it started with Windows 7 and VMWare Workstation for me.

The Year of Desktop Linux is delivered on VMs.

Links to benchmarks?

Exactly. That's why there are in maximum benchmarks of current WSL comparing to older WSL releases just like in the announcement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com