Hacker News Reader

Comment by auganov | Hacker News Reader

It's not spelled out clearly, but I'm understanding that the main rationale here is to:

  - have an Ubuntu dev environment, 
  - while benefiting from Win's RDP 
  - AND also having access to native Windows for testing.

Because Clojure runs perfectly well on regular Windows, it's not like WSL is required. So otherwise the author would have to have a separate Windows install just for testing.

View on HN

Author here. This sums it up well. I want the WSL2 setup so I can also keep running the zsh setup and bash scripts I was already using on macOS. For work I need to run several Docker containers in addition to the Clojure/Java stuff. Since I had not used Docker on Windows prior to WSL2, I jumped to the combination immediately. I figured that running everything in WSL2 was easier than some things inside and some things outside.

Well if you don't strictly need Ubuntu chances are your scripts would work with Cygwin. Which operates under the regular Windows paradigm. Then you can use native Emacs too[0].

I've been doing Clojure stuff on a pure Windows setup for quite a while and honestly I liked it more than my current Linux setup (only switched because of some linux kernel features I needed).

[0] note that ansi-term is (or used to be) broken on Windows tough , other than that pretty much everything works

I think Cygwin and msys are essentially deprecated at this point. WSL is easier to setup and more compatible. I was big Cygwin fan for a long time, but I've definitely run into edge cases that it couldn't handle. WSL works pretty flawlessly for me so far and I can just use apt for package management instead of the Cygwin setup tool.

Depends if you care about doing anything natively on Windows or not. Say Windows has perfectly good native support for NodeJS. If you go with WSL you'll be running WSL's Node. Many may not want that.

Java/Clojure same deal. There's no problem with them on Windows. Running everything under WSL sounds like a big compromise to make to me. Though for Java/Clojure I could imagine you could still for most projects start your software from the normal java.exe as jars generally don't have platform specific code. But in my codebase I do actually use a few libraries that are system specific.

You can run windows apps within WSL too though.

(I guess maybe not WSL2)

Well the thing is if you npm install a lot of stuff using the WSL version there may be packages that include platform specific stuff. Then trying to run it with the native node might not work. But thinking of it I guess you could have all the WSL scripts use the native version. Not sure if there would be issues.

Or let's say you have to compile something that you want to use as a child process in your software. If you compile that under WSL (correct me if I'm wrong[0]) it's not going to be easily accessible to normal Windows apps.

[0] I see that now there's some way to invoke wsl commands from regular Windows but not sure how that works exactly.

Magit performance alone is enough to make me never want to run Emacs on Windows natively. I encounter various other issues as well, for example inferior modes missing prompts.

How is it on WSL2? I tried magit on WSL1 and it was still terribly slow.

Native speed.

Lots of bits and pieces very helpful eg the one about memory. Thanks.

FWIW this is what I do. And I run stuff in WSL when I occasionally encounter stuff that won't run directly on Win10. Been working for me for about a year now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com