Particularly for the more complex cases of container APIs, GPU access, desktop integration, etc. Those are solved problems in the VM space and reinventing new solutions at a slightly different layer is not necessarily wise or realistic.
For my use cases, I just want to target unix-like APIs and use bash-isms so I can reuse my build scripts and tooling. I don't really care if the binary format I consume or compile to is different to Linux - as long as my development experience is identical across MacOS, Windows and Linux.
A thin layer on top of Windows that mimics Linux so I can run bash _properly_ is all I really need.
The closest I've come is using Msys2 with zsh and uutils and it is so close but there are still cases where it simply doesn't work. WSL1 was pretty close but it falls short by needing remote development tools and having isolated storage/poor performance interacting with host storage.
WSL2 is DOA for me, I just hand roll my own Linux VM and call it a day.
For example, if you were a Unix archiver extracting a file, you'd call stat() open() write() close() chmod() utimes(). On Linux/BSD that's 1 file open/close, but on Windows, that's 4 file opens/closes because the Windows APIs need an open filehandle, while the POSIX APIs take a filepath. Linux/BSD have LRU caches of filepath->inode because they're designed around these APIs, Windows doesn't. Cygwin has to open/close a Windows filehandle each time because it can't make the calling code pass a filehandle instead.
So it may be more comfortable and familiar, but also Windows APIs are unsympathetic to code designed for Unix originally.
See this talk on how the developers of rustup massively improved their performance on Windows by restructuring their code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/i...
That has to be sarcasm, right?
Then again, I see WSL as a poor man's Linux ("poor man" being a developer in some enterprise who can't pick their tools freely due to some IT policy).
And while WSL is worse than Linux without Windows, I still prefer it over MacOS with Linux running in a VM.
I know conventional VMs do this kind of thing too, but I've always found it more awkward to set it up, you have to install special tools or kernel modules, etc. With WSL it just works out of the box.
The one exception: my God filesystem performance on WSL1 was ass, and not an easy problem to fix
Something like skeeto's w64devkit? https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit