Because they want to support Git for Windows which is built upon Cygwin/msys. And this is fine because Cygwin is much faster than WSL and a good Windows integration is so much easier. Would be a total PITA if Git would only be available through WSL.
Cygwin is still the best thing ever happened to Windows (or to Linuxers who are forced to work with Windows).
Sure WSL1 could never have handled docker as-is, but general software would've been mostly fine and given us damn good windows application integration. (And I'm sure some Docker shims would've appeared fairly quickly to satisfy most basic developer needs).
These days I'm just running a full blown Linux DE in a VirtualBox VM since its graphic console isn't objectively terrible like Hyper-V. If for some reason I need to copy/sync files with the Windows host - well that's just an rsync away thanks to Cywgin.
Is it? I'm pretty sure WSL is much faster if your workflow allows putting files on Linux filesystem, but I also recall that perf in shared Windows folders felt about the same (bad, but not even worse) when I switched from msys git to WSL. But haven't used Windows in years, so memory could be bad.
Cygwin is roughly 100x slower with forking than Linux on the same hardware.
I understand that Postgres benefits greatly in running under the WSL for this reason.
Works like a charm and I can use cool terminal (bash) with all CLI tools I love so much.
I read that, but I was wondering why they wanted that because they don't say. I've never noticed git to be slow under WSL but I guess that very much depends on your repo size and exactly what you are doing. It all sounds like a tremendous amount of hassle otherwise.
I agree, Cygwin did enable us to work productively for many years. But Cygwin's drive mounting modes caused lots of pain. And the Xserver is simply awful. It is/was a constant source of issues, the worst being the incredibly frustrating crashes. Maybe they were due to underlying issues in the applications themselves but those apps work fine under WSLg (of course there are other bugs but we can still work with those).
This is made worse because git uses the os-specific file statistics including inode number to track file changes. These change over most such file systems types which triggers it to rebuild the entire file cache every time you switch OS running git commands. Which if you have shell integration is constantly.
I share my git repos between MacOS and a Linux volume and it hurts on any repo with 100s of thousands of files or more. Ceph, Linux kernel, etc.
I've found this thorough explanation https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197#issuecomment-60...
I also use WSL1 though so maybe my setup is weird.