Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dawnerd 2607 days ago
I find it amusing you claim docker on mac was frustrating when it's damn near useless on Windows. File change notifications still don't work right (as of about a month ago).

Edit: I'd love to use Windows as my daily BTW, it's just not there yet for me. I don't want to have to jump through hoops to make my current workflow, work.

2 comments

With the new WSL2, you can run Docker natively!
How is performance? I used Windows subsystem for Linux a year or so ago. Using a package manager to pull down some dependencies, which should take on the order of tens of seconds took several minutes to complete. It was painfully slow.
WSL2 now uses VM technology, so the performance is now a lot better.
Wow, that's a welcomed change for me. I was trying every 3-4 months to get WSL working as a suitable development environment. There was always _something_. Excited to try this out again when I have a free day on a weekend.
WSL performance problems were mostly due to slow I/O.

How does virtualization fix that?

Translating syscalls to the NT kernel is slower than running Linux with a virtual filesystem.
But in the end, the virtual filesystem is backed up by done Windows storage?
WSL in beta was significantly faster than that. Not sure what was wrong with your install or if it was something else (apt-get has always been crazy fast for me).
Looking forward to trying it out. I hope this means nodemon, etc will work as expected without having to enable 'legacy mode'
> File change notifications still don't work right

WSL doesn't support the inotify api so even basic tools like tail don't work.

Actually, I believe inotify was added back in 2016 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/wsl-adds-inotify-...)
It's still an issue in 2019: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/3292

In ubuntu you have to pass the --disable-inotify flag and the Debian version (without this flag) simply doesn't work.

Not the person you're replying to but I believe docker just hasn't added support. There's been a few issues regarding it open for a long time with no movement at all.