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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft: put a good POSIX layer into Windows. The times are mature now, and this allows your platform to benefit from a lot of open source system software easily, without portings and compatibility layers. At the same time, now that developers start to be annoyed big time by Apple nonsensical Mac handling, this gives a lot of devs, not developing primarily for the Win arch, the ability to evaluate Windows as a development machine.

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It used to have a POSIX subsystem, but was removed in Windows 8.1: https://blog.ret2.io/2017/09/20/subsystem-posix/

Spot on on quite a few counts. It is a way to regain developer mindshare, drive migration to Windows 10 (a major business target since many companies are still running Windows 7, which prevents adoption of modern enterprise features — even bits of Office services) and onboard more developers to Azure, since a substantial portion of online companies run Linux.

As a long-time Mac user working at Microsoft (with Azure), this is the perfect storm. I can do everything I need on WSL 1 (except some networking stuff, obviously) and WSL 2 is going to let me get rid of Docker Desktop’s virtualization for Linux containers.

The pure geek in me really wishes they'd bring back SFU. Windows has a really impressive mechanism for implementing subsystems (I can't remember for sure, but I believe win32 is actually implemented on top of this layer).

I'm sure there's far more complexity involved than I could imagine, but I've always loved the idea of having a bunch of different subsystems running without the need for virtualization.

V1 of WSL (which isn’t going to go away IIRC) was essentially an iteration/improvement of the subsystem model, but with new things like picoprocesses.

This article[1] has a good overview of the design goals, which mainly was to let unmodified binaries run.

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/04/22/windows-subs...

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