Recent versions of WSL feel even more transparent than being “just a VM” because graphical apps started within WSL seamlessly integrate with the Windows desktop. Because of this, WSL can sometimes be even more convenient than macOS, which sounded shocking to me when I said that out loud a couple of days ago: macOS is truly a Unix system underneath but, unfortunately, you have to bend over backwards to make some stuff work. In particular, WSL works very well because it is Linux, which means you can run a regular Debian system and have almost everything work out of the box. You can’t use this for administration tasks much, which I still think is a pity, but it’s a very useful environment to support development tasks. WSL, or Windows Subsystem for Linux, brings a real Unix-y interface to Windows ( again). These days I do write software “for” Windows (I work on Azure Storage after all, but that’s so infrastructure-y that barely qualifies) yet, for my personal projects, I still continue to develop code that primarily runs on Unix systems. So let’s start this part by talking about the crown jewel of development on modern Windows: the WSL + Windows Terminal + VSCode trifecta.įor a little bit of context: if you don’t know me, I’ve spent almost all of my programming years (so far!) on Unix systems, though I do have some experience writing software for Windows: I wrote a few toys back in the day with Visual Basic 3.0 and created Boost.Process during the Google Summer of Code 2006 program to teach myself some Win32. I hadn’t touched Windows to write code since 2006 and the development experience has massively changed for the better during the last 6 years. We are finally entering the final part of this one-year retrospective by shifting gears into developer-oriented topics.
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