Hacker News Reader

Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

My git status/add/commit/push cycle has gone from seconds to minutes in length. It's unbearable and I'm going to abandon wsl as a result.

Shame, it was really good.

View on HN

You can convert WSL2 to WSL1! There's an argument to wsl.exe you can use to go back.

Do it, free yourself (and your kernel)

Will do! Thank-you.

I feel like they don't advertise this enough. I was under the impression that it's a one way street from wsl1 to wsl2. Since wsl2 is not strictly better than wsl1, it's nice to be able to convert and pick the trade-offs you want.

Yeah, the mistake of using numbers instead of names gives the impression that 2 is strictly better than 1 and that migrations are unidirectional upgrades.

Even just letters like WSL-A and WSL-B might have given a better impression.

Is your git repo inside of the WSL2 file system or mounted through a Windows directory like it would have been with WSL1?

The supposed speed boosts of WSL2 requires having your files living directly inside of WSL2's file system.

I haven't tried WSL2 yet since I'm waiting for it to hit stable.

why not use git natively? I've never understood why people use git in WSL since the IO performance isn't great

I use Emacs in WSL, along with a suite of other tools like rust-analyzer, and the experience is _lightyears_ beyond trying to run those tools under regular Windows.

Can't you just store your repositories in the ext4 partition then?

I need them available to Windows tools, like Visual Studio and Unity.

I think the popular Windows development tools will get support for remote development with WSL. JetBrains is working on it for IntelliJ and I can't imagine Visual Studio will be far behind.

I need it working fast now. I won't upgrade to WSL2 until its speed is improved.

Unfortunately Git on Windows is also extremely slow. Especially using Magit in emacs, which does a lot of git calls, works much, much faster for me if it's sshing to a Linux VM for each call then running natively on Windows.

That may have been the case in the past, but Microsoft put some effort into making Git faster in Windows.

Also, remember to disable the antivirus for your Git folder!

If only that were up to me... Company laptop, company antivirus, company code...

Git is not slow for me. Don't know about Emacs, but I'm using git from command line and from Idea and it works just fine, instantly for ordinary tasks. Commiting 1000+ files takes few seconds.

Given the fact that Git is used for Windows development with monster monorepository, I think that something's wrong with your setup rather than Git on Windows in general.

Git itself is decent, the problem is that Magit calls git a lot of times for a single GUI action. For some things, it can call git 5-10 times for a single key press. If every git invocation is around 1 second, that becomes a noticeable delay...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com