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by yebyen 2236 days ago
> Because (possibly unlike with your Rails example?) the suggestion that this is possible to do by improving the VM side is, to be blunt, a lie. A VM is a fundamentally leaky abstraction, in far more ways than just the timing behavior (i.e. performance), and they need for both won't go away by just "fixing" the VM side.

The fun part about my example is actually that he saw a 60% performance difference, but only recovered 38% of that by fixing the one bug that was exposed in the talk.

It was decidedly a bug. Refusing to cop out and say "it's a necessary evil, and can't be fixed" got him that 38% boost in one shot. The remaining ~22% is still a problem that has yet to be explained completely, but now it's not as big (or soon won't be, when they resolve the issues created by fixing the bug, which AIUI it couldn't be merged yet...)

I do get your point, and I grok that parts of this problem simply can't be fixed outright. But from my perspective, the bug isn't that WSL2 is missing features of WSL1, it's that WSL1 performs 60% slower for my use cases (*not an actual measurement) while doing what appears to be, at least from my perspective, basically what is meant to be the same task. I don't really know why, except by what some greater experts have shared, some of that which I have acquired by osmosis.

Your use cases are valid, and we mostly agree, when you say the limits of the technology have not been reached, it seems like we're both arguing that there are simply more bugs yet.