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535 points raddad | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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hobs ◴[] No.11390553[source]
Some additional details from Scott Hanselman:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUs...

"This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself. It's fast and lightweight and it's the real binaries. This is an genuine Ubuntu image on top of Windows with all the Linux tools I use like awk, sed, grep, vi, etc. It's fast and it's lightweight. The binaries are downloaded by you - using apt-get - just as on Linux, because it is Linux. You can apt-get and download other tools like Ruby, Redis, emacs, and on and on. This is brilliant for developers that use a diverse set of tools like me."

"This runs on 64-bit Windows and doesn't use virtual machines. Where does bash on Windows fit in to your life as a developer?

If you want to run Bash on Windows, you've historically had a few choices.

Cygwin - GNU command line utilities compiled for Win32 with great native Windows integration. But it's not Linux. HyperV and Ubuntu - Run an entire Linux VM (dedicating x gigs of RAM, and x gigs of disk) and then remote into it (RDP, VNC, ssh) Docker is also an option to run a Linux container, under a HyperV VM Running bash on Windows hits in the sweet spot. It behaves like Linux because it executes real Linux binaries. Just hit the Windows Key and type bash. "

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drinchev ◴[] No.11390574[source]
> This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself.

How does it work without VM? I'm super curious!

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pionar ◴[] No.11390601[source]
They added a subsystem in Windows that responds to Linux APIs.
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PeCaN ◴[] No.11390922[source]
They've had a POSIX subsystem (SUA) for a while, but it's kind of ancient. I assume they resurrected it and implemented some Linux-specific APIs, which would actually be SO COOL.
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bitcrazed ◴[] No.11391841[source]
No - this is a whole new thing.

The Windows POSIX subsystem which shipped in NT 3.5.1 was a minimal implementation of POSIX syscall API plus a userland toolset. That was replaced with Interix which was renamed Services for Unix (SFU) which had a more comprehensive kernel implementation and more up to date userland. However that tech was not resurrected to build the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Importantly, WSL doesn't ship with a distro - we download a genuine Ubuntu userland image at install-time and then run binaries within it.

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1. JdeBP ◴[] No.11416488[source]
> However that tech was not resurrected ...

I, for one, would like to see it resurrected. It's exceedingly useful, and is one major reason that I am not, nor will be, using Windows 10. This new subsystem does not have the things that I use SFU/SFUA for. Nor does it have the BSD-style toolset of SFU/SFUA.