zlacker

>>lostms+(OP)
The story reminds me of Andy Hertzfeld’s Switcher:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

The difference is that, in 1984, Bill Gates immediately offered $40k and Steve Jobs offered $100k for plugging a hole in their operating system.

In 2020, Microsoft just strings you along on vague promises while they simultaneously rip you off.

>>pavlov+7b
I love how those stories of the early years are so different from what I think of looking at companies today -

> Jeff picked me up at the airport, and we drove to Microsoft's main building where we were joined by Neil Konzen, a talented 23 year old who was Microsoft's main systems programmer on the Macintosh. I knew Neil from his days as an early Apple II hobbyist, when we collaborated on adding features to an assembly language development system when he was only 16.

Just... "Microsoft's main systems programmer on the Macintosh" is such a weird sentence to read today. On the other hand, Microsoft also shipped Xenix, a full-on licensed Unix™ OS before they shipped DOS.

>>yjftsj+df
Windows NT is designed out of the box for extending and embracing Unix. The whole Linux Subsystem thing isn't something new that required deep reworking of the kernel.

>>sansno+Ok
On the other hand, WSL2 is based on virtualisation rather than NT kernel personalities. Apparently building it 'on top' or 'inside' NT ends not not being good enough.

>>onepla+er
I don't think that's a failure of the NT subsystem approach, I think that's just that Linux turned out to have a massive and changing ABI surface and Microsoft didn't want to try and recreate the whole thing by clean room reimplementation. Yes, there were some difficulties because of different underlying primitives, but in my outsider's opinion, they could have made it work if they've been wanting to spend the time and effort.

>>yjftsj+1w
The problem they couldn't solve is file system performance -- there's just too much of difference conceptually between files in Windows and files in Linux to make it perform reasonably well for the sorts of jobs people were using.

In the end, it just makes more sense to pull in the actual Linux kernel than to try and achieve the same performance semantics.