Why the default WSL terminal is so fast and other commentary about low-level API | Hacker News Reader

Why the default WSL terminal is so fast and other commentary about low-level API

github.com

45 pointsfasm11 comments

The question I'm more interested in is, why is everything else drastically slow? Contentious opinions on Windows as an operating system are common, but as a user I've been able to feel the impact of the kernel itself becoming a crufty horror show.

When upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on release, I didn't notice too much of a difference. There was outrage at the time (no more start button!) but my only real issues with it were philosophical, the edging towards the 'walled garden'. Then some time later Windows 8.1 came out and the experience, for me, was __dreadful__. Everything was so much slower. The icons on my desktop suddenly couldn't even load in time at login, temporarily being replaced by placeholder white squares. Every click, every keystroke had noticeable latency. Was it just me? Initially I thought it was just a bad installation from the upgrade process. I did a few fresh installs across the years and it still was still so slow it hurt. Windows 8.1 became praised as the saviour of Windows 8, but that wasn't my experience.

These days I maintain a Windows 7 installation at home. Making heavy use of Cygwin, I find the experience to be fine. At work we're on Windows 10 and it's __horrifying__. Cygwin's speed will never be a fair representation of how a program should run because of all the hoops it has to jump through, but to see the difference between running it on Windows 7 is __staggering__. The Windows 7 experience is akin to a native terminal on Linux, the Windows 10 experience is like a remote desktop.

I feel the same experience in other programs, especially Visual Studio, which is a large portion of my day. Nobody else I talk to shares my frustrations. Am I just super picky? Maybe everyone else is now acclimated to everything being innately slow? That seems like a stretch. But using Windows 10 isn't something I would do out of anything other than necessity because dealing with its speed is like pulling teeth.

Windows is just slow as molasses, and it's not getting any faster over time either. Even the Windows XP desktop, which came out in the early 2000s is actually slower than a lightweight Linux install from the present day.

(For that matter, the snappy experience I get while running a super light Linux desktop on modern hardware is unlike anything else I'd ever experienced on x86-like hardware running a modern-day OS. It's too bad that Windows is nowhere close to matching it - I think most people these days just have no clue what they're missing. And it's not like recent mac-OS versions are all that better.)

do you have an antivirus at work?

They definitely worked on this at Microsoft. I am running the latest insider build at home and compared to my works PC which is 2 official releases behind its way snappier. Start menu pops up instantly, search finally works, the button hover effects don't seem to miss frames anymore.

All this complaining about the latency and slowness of terminal applications seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. Strangely enough I have yet to experience this slowness, even though the newest piece of 'user-facing' hardware I use is a 2004 ThinkPad T42p - not exactly a speed demon by modern standards. Both the bare console as well as the multitude of terminal windows are more than fast and responsive enough, had I not read about them supposedly being sluggish I'd never have given it any thought. They still do not feel sluggish to me so I wonder why others seem to experience them as being so. My systems nearly all run some form of Linux with Xmonad and some parts of Mate, mate-terminal (i.e. Yet Another libvte terminal application) amongst them. I regularly have about 30 terminal windows active spread over three workspaces which I switch between without problems or lag. While terminal applications might not be much faster than they were in '92 when I first started using Linux and in that sense have gotten heavier and 'slower' they do seem to perform well enough for me to use them without qualms.

> Of course this also means that we have trade offs. We don't support fully international text like pretty much every other application will. RTL? No go zone right now. Surrogate pairs and emoji? We're getting there but not there yet. Indic scripts? Nope.

These seem like pretty major things to trade away, especially for something that's as widely used around the world as Windows.

This is a Linux terminal. I'd guess it see 99.99% ASCII. I think they have bigger fish to fry.

This is a very incorrect assumption. Everybody wants to be able to use native language for program output and input, view and edit texts in native language using less, sed, vim.

Never had 200ms lag on stock Windows. I'd suspect 3rd party antivirus or data loss prevention software to slow down everything except WSL console. Many AVs/DLPs still can't look into WSL. They are all piece of crap rendering even powerful PCs completely unusable, eating lots of processor cycles and disk throughput in kernel, thus not visible to Task Manager.

Windows PowerShell is also smooth as butter. After using it for a bit going back to macos or linux terminals feels sluggish.

It should be, it is also conhost based. The effect mentioned is a conhost thing, not WSL, powershell or any other thing that uses conhost. ubuntu.exe is not a seperate terminal in that sense.

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