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Comment by moonchrome | Hacker News Reader

>and it’s actually quite nice for development

If we are talking about stuff like backend web development then I'd say no, it's actually a pain to work with - few people bother deploying to Windows these days, many libraries/frameworks treat it like a second class citizen, tooling doesn't translate well (or at all).

Even frontend webdev is very unixy due to node/npm and popularity of Macs in that space.

When you're talking about OpenCV, GPU related things, game dev then the situation is reversed.

So it highly depends on what you're developing.

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I think we each live in our own bubbles. I see very few people on macs or linuxes, almost everyone uses Windows and they're fine with web development. What's so unixy about node/npm? They feel like very good windows citizens.

For the most part npm has worked for me on Windows, but it's so incredibly slow compared to even npm in a Linux VM on the same host. I understand this is mostly due to FS overhead related to a multitude of small files.

Obviously this isn't a deal breaker in most situations, but it is a bit annoying. I've observed similar performance problems running Webpack on Windows in the past.

Add your npm directories to the virus file exclusion lists of Windows Defender. Note that some of the directories may not be obvious (those under AppData for example). The speed improvements are massive for tools like these that touch lots of small files.

Also take a look at this talk on NTFS, file system speed, and how the presenter optimized the Rust installer: https://youtu.be/qbKGw8MQ0i8 . There is an awful lot that can be done to tools that deal with lots of files to perform well under Windows too.

There’s a possibility this is due to corporate antivirus. Many AV solutions (seemingly not Windows Defender) scan every file that’s written, massively slowing down IO, but they can’t scan VHDs. Excluding the folder where node_modules is or running npm inside WSL2 has good performance on my work laptop, in a random windows folder not so much.

There was a HN post a while back where a MS engineer was explaining why windows file system access will never be as fast as Linux.

> I understand this is mostly due to FS overhead related to a multitude of small files.

No. It was the VFS design. They have lots hooks and extension points for 3rd party, there is no way to improve without breaking backward compatibility. It was the reason why many antivirus was broken in the first few releases of windows 10.

Node didn't even run on Windows for a while and then when support was added it was very buggy for a long time - it clearly has roots in Mac/Linux ecosystem and windows was a second class citizen. Can't comment on recent support because haven't done front-end on Windows >5 years.

The only time I see Windows frontend devs is full-stack .NET shops or low cost outsourcing centers. If nothing else then just for practicality - you need to test on Safari and iOS so might as well get Mac devices.

Are you in a .Net shop?

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