I've mentioned before that I generally keep my project source directories at work in a place where there are accessibly from the host (Windows) operating system, my msys working environment, and my WSL (linux) instances.1 Some IT trouble recently has seem me migrate off my usual work machine onto a loaner and now back to the (freshly re-imaged) original. Which has meant re-building my working environments a couple of times.
Now, with one thing and another my re-imaged machine came back to me without a stand-alone X11 server,2 so I though "Now'd be a good time to see if WSL2 really is better than WSL1; what with the wslg display adapter meaning that WSL2 doesn't need X11." Anyone familiar with this domain will know that WSL2 has been a thing for quite a while now, but the combination of (a) inertia and (b) reports that access to the host-filesystem access was slow on 2 had kept me from moving forward.
Anyway, I tried it today.
The virtual machine actual runs noticably faster which is nice, but "slow" doesn't even begin to describe the productivity bottle-neck that is access to the host filesystem. Holy deity-figure-on-a-pogo-stick, Batman! This performs like something offered as a minimum viable product from a failing startup run by kids who really should have stayed in school. A sloth dying in a tarpit moves faster than a cmake configure over that channel. I was longing for the heady days of running autoconf on a pentium. I had time to muse about the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of tapes as delivered by continental drift.
I'm following a colleague's lead and keeping a separate source tree for the WSL image and using rsync-spawned-by-cron to keep them tracking one-another.3
And now we get around to the question of incompetence versus malice. The famous adage tells us to set our Baysean prior in favor of "Incompetence", but this is a Microsoft product on it's second version number. Incompetence simply isn't what I would expect. The usual excuses just ring hollow: the people who put this together are not beginners, they had access to as much deep technical support as they needed, and they had a v1 product out in the world doing well so there wasn't a live-or-die deadline to meet.
On the other hand, Microsoft has more than a little history of trying to leverage their market share to try to kill inconvenient competitors.
1 For that matter before some "security" upgrades broke all the non-Microsoft virtualization tools on Windows (VirtualBox we hardly knew 'ya), I would use those same files from my virtual machines, too.
2 Probably an oversight on my part as I don't recall saying that I needed one.
3 The thing is that parts of the host filesystem (includind the bit where I keep the source trees) is auto-backed up by IT, a feature that's very handy for the biggest part of your daily work, eh?
No comments:
Post a Comment