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Comment by sz4kerto | Hacker News Reader

I'd really loved this a few years ago; but now VS Code's "Remote" extension helps most of my issues. It's just brilliant that I can do e.g. embedded dev on a physical Linux box while running the IDE on Windows.

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Same here! I remember I found it such a pain that the embedded toolchains were mostly exclusively for Windows. I dabbled around with cloud9 IDE for a bit, but it wouldn't fit my workflow.

Nowadays the WSL basically made Windows my all-in-one development environment. My stack is WSL, docker and Jetbrains IDEs (but the latter is just a matter of personal taste). I haven't touched my Linux desktop in over a year.

Personally, for my workflow, I no longer see a benefit in running a cloud IDE. But maybe that for junior or aspiring devs a cloud IDE will make it much more easy to get started.

WSL doesn't have access to USB device (well, you can make it work more or less, but it's a pain). So the remote extension is great in this case.

That is the point that I was trying to make: I used to work on Linux and spinning up a virtual machine to run the Windows tools (USB was also a pain with that).

But now, thanks to WSL I have turned that around. I now run Windows so I can run the windows-only debuggers natively, and still have all the unix tools available through the WSL CLI.

Admittedly I do not do much embedded development anymore, but I'm pretty sure I could launch Windows ICD tools from the WSL CLI.

Do you run the Linux versions of your Jetbrains IDEs using WSL or the native Windows versions? I was setting exactly this up just this past weekend after 10 years of running Linux exclusively and I'm not sure which way to go.

The only thing remaining to have a complete developer experience on Windows would be to convince Apple to allow building of iOS apps on other operating systems.

As someone who has been cursing Apple’s abominably obnoxious attitude in this regard for the last few days, this would be music to my ears.

I think it’s never going to happen. It’s the complete antithesis of everything that Apple stands for as a company.

Beside that reason (true) a mayor roadblock would be that the iOS simulator (the simulated debug device running alongside Xcode on the development host) is a simulator, not an emulator: it runs iOS libraries re-compiled for x64 using the macOS kernel (and the macOS Foundation and Cocoa libraries) support. Porting that on another host OS is probably borderline impossible. Doing something borderline impossible that will increase your support requests just to make people stop using machines you sell is not a good business proposition, I suppose.

There are tons of Android emulators running under Windows. So it doesn't seem borderline impossible.

The easiest thing would probably be to virtualize the OS X kernel.

Sure, but do you see Apple ever doing that?

Apple already did clones once, it is never to happen again.

That extension is proprietary.

Sure. I'd by happy to pay for it if it wasn't free.

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