WSL is a threat to open software. At best a gateway. Anyone who believes Microsoft has changed is at best naive and at worst a fool. We have decades of evidence to show that Microsoft doesn’t change. The sooner you move to a new platform the better. And don’t bring Microsoft with you.
I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all.
Which makes me wonder: why? Do MS not have enough top-flight kernel engineers any more to do an in-kernel version of gvisor?
https://github.com/google/gvisor
> I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all.
As far as I understand it, WSL1 was a complete reimplementation and did not use any code from the old POSIX subsystem/SUA/Interix. In particular, SUA had a number of long-standing limitations (like when replacing open files) which were probably unfixable without rewriting everything anyway. It allegedly is a continuation of Project Astoria which implemented only the minimum necessary part to make Android apps run, but was refocused to run all Linux applications.
