Why do people use wsl? The only reason I can think of is to take advantage of Bash and the shell environment. But if wsl runs in its own container separate from Windows, what’s the point?
When WSL first came out, all the documentation i read from Microsoft led me to believe it was intended to help developers who are cross-developing software for both Linux and Windows to more easily test features and compatibility and to ensure software behaves consistently. It never seemed like they intended it to be used to run Linux programs fully and integrate into the Windows environment. It always seemed like it was just there for convenience so a smaller budget developer could develop on one machine and not need to be constantly rebooting or running VMs.
Maybe I’m not aware of similar configurations you can do, but it’s only sorta it’s own container. VSCode can actually directly connect to it automatically so you can develop in host os but run directly against the container. Additionally this means some visualization/gui interfaces can be visible on the host side (this is a gift and a curse).
So you basically have system integrated containers/vms. It’s not perfect, but it is definitely leagues better than what windows development was prior and may have some advantages over Linux only deployments (not sure if the system integrations are feasible in Linux hosts).
Why do people use wsl? The only reason I can think of is to take advantage of Bash and the shell environment. But if wsl runs in its own container separate from Windows, what’s the point?
Being a software developer but your work laptop is a Windows machine?
When WSL first came out, all the documentation i read from Microsoft led me to believe it was intended to help developers who are cross-developing software for both Linux and Windows to more easily test features and compatibility and to ensure software behaves consistently. It never seemed like they intended it to be used to run Linux programs fully and integrate into the Windows environment. It always seemed like it was just there for convenience so a smaller budget developer could develop on one machine and not need to be constantly rebooting or running VMs.
Msys2 can be used for that btw
Maybe I’m not aware of similar configurations you can do, but it’s only sorta it’s own container. VSCode can actually directly connect to it automatically so you can develop in host os but run directly against the container. Additionally this means some visualization/gui interfaces can be visible on the host side (this is a gift and a curse).
So you basically have system integrated containers/vms. It’s not perfect, but it is definitely leagues better than what windows development was prior and may have some advantages over Linux only deployments (not sure if the system integrations are feasible in Linux hosts).