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And you can choose between a bunch of distros, so you have the Ubuntu apt-get repos right at your fingertips if you choose Ubuntu, for example. It's a proper Linux run-time, with no boot time, embedded right into Windows. I won't go into detail about how WSL works here, I'll save that for a separate blog post.īut suffice to say, WSL rocks.
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And I don't think I know anyone that uses Windows that didn't use to use Cygwin before WSL came along. Think of it as the business version of WINE, that lets you run Windows programs on Linux.
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It's a complete re-implementation of the Linux kernel system calls, against the NT kernel. WSL is short for Windows Subsystem for Linux. It'll happen.īut because of WSL, this is now a thing of the past. And you can sort of blame the JVM APIs that shelling out isn't made cross platform compatible. So my guess is that it simply never occurred to anyone to test it on Windows. Almost nobody combines Windows and ClojureScript, at least two years ago. For example, a couple of years ago, I tried to compile ClojureScript on Windows, and it failed because of the way it shelled out to call npm for installing npm module dependencies. It's getting pretty rare, but it does happen. So you're bound to run into problems on Windows. They're mostly used by people that use Linux or macOS. The software platforms I choose - Clojure, Kotlin, and other JVM languages - have one thing in common: What has changed? The big thing that is different now is WSL. Those that know me, laugh at the idea that I started that sentence with "maybe". Maybe that will happen again in the future. I have switched to Windows before, and ended up switching back. Personal preferences are both normal and OK.
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I have absolutely nothing against the use of macOS or Linux. I just wanted to get this one out of the way. This post is part of a series: Advent Calendar 2019
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