[jcranmer]

> (Linux is of course the best designed and implemented among the non-realtime, not provably correct and not secure kernels)

That is a coffee-spewing statement. Linux generally has a reputation of approaching new features by coming late to the party, seeing the mistakes everyone else made in the feature, and then implementing it somehow even more poorly than everybody else.

An example of a particularly bad Linux subsystem is ptrace, which interacts poorly with threads, relies on signals (itself a bit of a mess of a feature), and is notorious for all the races you have to do to actually properly set up a debugger. The Windows debugger API is much simpler, and even includes some features I'd love to have in Linux instead (hello, CreateRemoteThread!). I was going to write to the parent comment that implementing ptrace to let you run gdb (or, worse, rr!) in WSL1 would have been something that every NT kernel programmer would have "NOPE"d at because the impedance mismatch is just that high.

[saagarjha]

I mean, it's entirely possible to implement ptrace if you spend enough time doing it, it will just be complicated and the performance will likely be not that great. (But yes, it's a pretty bad API.)