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Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

> My computer feels fast again

A while back (Win XP?), I got frustrated with Windows and installed Linux on my dev machine instead. But I still had to run Windows, so I installed VMWare on Linux on that machine and ran Windows in a VM. For whatever reason, Windows was noticeably faster in the VM than running on bare metal. Super bizarre OS.

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In my last job my Windows box was unbelievably slow at compilation. Windows Defender was burning 70% of the CPU on watching GCC I guess.

Using Linux in a VM compiled three times faster.

I don't know how people tolerate it.

I think part of it is that creating a process is cheap in Unix-style OSs, and expensive in Windows. Windows doesn't want you to exec gcc, cpp, ld, etc. over and over again. It wants you to run an IDE that does it all in one process.

How many IDEs run it all in one process? As far as I know they still call lots of processes.

Visual Studio calls just one (msbuild) for almost all of the compilation process, perhaps half a dozen processes at most. Certainly not hundreds to thousands, as typically seen under Linux.

Visual Studios creates worker threads used for compiling C# that are reused for builds. This can be seen in task manager. Ran into a bug were the VS compiler would only work properly for one build and require VS to be restarted.

Visual Studios is like Windows, each version just seems to be getting worse with more bugs.

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