in reply to Re: What's happening with the Cygwin project?
in thread What's happening with the Cygwin project?

Can you say more about why WSL is better?
  • Comment on Re^2: What's happening with the Cygwin project?

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Re^3: What's happening with the Cygwin project?
by jo37 (Curate) on Oct 24, 2024 at 09:56 UTC

    With WSL, the packages in use are native Linux, whereas in Cygwin there is only a subset available. Installing a package from source may work, but is cumbersome. When you select a new Cygwin package for installation, the package manager will update everything. Maybe you get a new perl version and you have to reinstall all of your local perl modules.

    I do not see any disadvantages in using WSL. The integration is flawless: you can run Win programs from bash and Linux programs from Win. X11 and Wayland are natively supported: no need for a separate X11/Wayland server.

    Greetings,
    🐻

    $gryYup$d0ylprbpriprrYpkJl2xyl~rzg??P~5lp2hyl0p$
[reply]
      > When you select a new Cygwin package for installation, the package manager will update everything.

      I think you can select what should be installed and what should be updated. At least it was possible 10 years ago when I used Cygwin at work.

      map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]
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[d/l]
        I think you can select what should be installed and what should be updated.

        This is certainly true on a per-package base. I don't remember having seen some kind of "global keep" switch - but this might be caused by my ignorance.

        AFAIR, dis-selecting a package from upgrading put it in some kind of "hold state": You would need to select it for an upgrade afterwards. That's just from memory and might be untrue.

        However, neither will I find out nor do I care anymore. Retired last month and will no longer waste my time with any "Redmondian Distribution".

        Greetings from the Island of San Miguel de La Palma,
        🐻

        $gryYup$d0ylprbpriprrYpkJl2xyl~rzg??P~5lp2hyl0p$
[reply]
        I do not see any disadvantages in using WSL.

      I've used WSL for some specific purposes, but from what I remember I had to allocate memory to it that could not be used by Windows. Perhaps I am misremembering, but if that is the case it's a big issue/disadvantage for me. With cygwin, both cygwin and windows have all the RAM available to them.

[reply]
        had to allocate memory to it that could not be used by Windows

        I have not had to do this — at least not explicitly.
        I'm currently using WSL on a fairly major project, using it as a vm for development, while the target environment is a Pi running Ubuntu.

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Re^3: What's happening with the Cygwin project?
by salva (Canon) on Oct 27, 2024 at 17:16 UTC
    Cygwin at its core is mainly the UNIX API implemented on top of Win32. WSL started in a very similar way, implementing Linux APIs as a new Windows subsystem, but then, for WSL2 they switched to a virtual machine approach. So, now, what you have there is a real Linux running on a virtual machine (you can even choose what distribution you want), with an extra layer for interoperability and integration with the host Windows OS. Because of this, current versions of WSL in general, work much better than Cygwin.

    To be honest, that makes me a bit sad, because the Cygwin endeavor was titanic and now it is loosing all its relevance. It involved not just fully re-implementing the UNIX API from scratch but also doing it on top of an OS providing, in several cases, incompatible abstractions (for instance, fork)... if the developers only had had access to the new functionality MS added for WSL1!

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