WSL2 is a different product from WSL1, not a different version. Is WSL3 now a different version of WSL2 or another separate product?

I jumped ship from Windows a couple of years ago after having used it since the early 90's. One of the primary reasons was how much I had to fight with WSL2 in my day-to-day work. But now it's becoming even more apparent that Microsoft does not care about its operating system. I don't even know what they could do to get me back. Trust continues to be a huge problem in the AI era of Microsoft.

Great job in benchmarking! I wasn't even aware of the WSLc (WSL3) release. For others, the release info is available here: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/releases/tag/3.0.1

EDIT: stumbled on the previous HN post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49970507

Lot of the WSL2 lag is not the VM itself, it's the 9P file sharing and interop.

I found that seems like anything under /mnt/c goes through 9P

I find that stuff that it offers over a normal Hyper-V VM is stuff that I don't need, leaky abstractions galore.

Despite the container support getting most of the attention, I discovered a measurable performance improvement with WSL3 by accident. Luckily I had another machine to upgrade so I ran an AB test comparing WSL 2 to WSL3 .

If you want a real bump in performance, I have a clever trick . Hardware isn’t cheap these days, so we demand the most of our software.

ok great benchmark! I work with herdr/pi for dev work and need to use a windows machine from my company. WSL currently unfortunately lags so much when typing, not sure why when using herdr... Using powershell, some features are missing, so i can't wait to try WSL3 and hope for improvements.

And yet it's still factors faster without a whole Windows around it.

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