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Comment by foxhill | Hacker News Reader

i'm saying this now; POSIX will never be a first class citizen on windows - we might get shims in /proc and /dev, but windows will never run from POSIX. as long as Win32 exists (and lets face it, that's not going away for a long time), we're basically stuck with running a docker container with linux on it in windows.

and that might be all you need. but for many *nix people, this is no where near enough.

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Why would you want this, when the NT kernel is so much better architected than any extant Unix except for perhaps Solaris?

POSIX is a standard.

Windows has yet to provide a consistent way how to obtain the OS version across releases. Then we can maybe talk about standardizing apps communications.

Uh, that may not be the best example. Are you aware of a reliable way to retrieve the OS version across all POSIX OSs? Because if you are, I would love to hear it.

Probably, but MS is a single vendor, with one (sort of) brand of an OS. They have full control over it.

This is not a container implementation. Microsoft transcoded Linux system calls to Windows kernel calls. It runs efficiently and natively.

That is: as efficient as possible on top of the windows process model. A process fork is still a magnitude slower and more expensive than on Linux. It is however a massive improvement over Cygwin, but it's still very noticeable when for example running more complex shell-scripts.

It's as native as can be, without being native. It's some amazing computational acrobatics, and it appears to be quite usable for development.

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