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Comment by brailsafe | Hacker News Reader

Using Windows for development feels like using Linux for anything but server-side work or Macos for gaming, it'll probably work if you have light requirements and don't use the shell that often, but when I think about the last time I tried it, it almost makes me feel fine paying $500 for a ram upgrade on my next mac

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Plenty of people use Windows for development, Linux for development and gaming, and macOS for everything including servers. It’s all about preference.

Want to use a cool dev tool on Windows boils down to, can you host a Linux VM?

E.g. How do you profile Rust programs on Windows in RustRover/Clion? How do you run Coz on Windows? Basically WSL or a full VM.

I had the same thought and had an Intel Mac, but then I tried WSL2 and it just works. Now my daily driver is a PC with specs that I wouldn't be able to afford if it was a Mac.

Honestly that's awesome, I admittedly haven't tried it yet

It's indeed. Having 128gb of RAM, a proper GPU and a lot of fast disk is awesome.

Is that a desktop or laptop you're on

Desktop.

I been developing with windows using golang and rust for a couple years now.

I just use vscode and native toolchains.

I don't even use WSL2 but I have basically identical experience as I do on my Linux desktop or my macOS desktop.

Windows + Mac is the slower of the trinity but not by a huge margin.

With Windows you really must disable the Windows Defender stuff for your dev folder or performance will tank as it scans build artifacts for viruses all of the time.

I successfully developed a large number of cross-os apps and currently are working on a game.

I think the OS at this point is not relevant.

I mostly game in Linux these days, so the Windows install is used less and less.

If you want bash like syntax, you can always run msys2 / Cygwin / WSL on Windows. But 99% of the time I just need to run basic commands like git and maybe pipe them to ripgrep or fzf, and frankly the PowerShell is fine for that. For anything more complicated, I'll write a script in Python or maybe JavaScript anyway, so I don't really care what shell I use as long as I can customize it and it can run basic commands. And if you don't like PowerShell, there's Nushell.

You could save yourself a lot of time by learning more bash so you didn't have to break out a programming language any time things get more complicated than piping into grep.

Actually Powershell is terrible for piping anything native. It will damage whatever data you pipe.

That's because unlike other shells where piping just passes through binary stream, Powershell is based around the concept of piping streams of .NET objects so it will try to parse output of one native command into a list of .NET strings, one for each line, and then print them out to input of another command. Not only making it extremely slow but also changing new lines \n to \r\n and maybe other special characters.

I just do everything within WSL2 which works well enough for my needs

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