
Why the default WSL terminal is so fast and other commentary about low-level API - fasm
https://github.com/Microsoft/console/issues/327
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BrS96bVxXBLzf5B
The question I'm more interested in is, why is everything else drastically
slow? Contentious opinions on Windows as an operating system are common, but
as a user I've been able to feel the impact of the kernel itself becoming a
crufty horror show.

When upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on release, I didn't notice too
much of a difference. There was outrage at the time (no more start button!)
but my only real issues with it were philosophical, the edging towards the
'walled garden'. Then some time later Windows 8.1 came out and the experience,
for me, was __dreadful__. Everything was so much slower. The icons on my
desktop suddenly couldn't even load in time at login, temporarily being
replaced by placeholder white squares. Every click, every keystroke had
noticeable latency. Was it just me? Initially I thought it was just a bad
installation from the upgrade process. I did a few fresh installs across the
years and it still was still so slow it hurt. Windows 8.1 became praised as
the saviour of Windows 8, but that wasn't my experience.

These days I maintain a Windows 7 installation at home. Making heavy use of
Cygwin, I find the experience to be fine. At work we're on Windows 10 and it's
__horrifying__. Cygwin's speed will never be a fair representation of how a
program should run because of all the hoops it has to jump through, but to see
the difference between running it on Windows 7 is __staggering__. The Windows
7 experience is akin to a native terminal on Linux, the Windows 10 experience
is like a remote desktop.

I feel the same experience in other programs, especially Visual Studio, which
is a large portion of my day. Nobody else I talk to shares my frustrations. Am
I just super picky? Maybe everyone else is now acclimated to everything being
innately slow? That seems like a stretch. But using Windows 10 isn't something
I would do out of anything other than necessity because dealing with its speed
is like pulling teeth.

~~~
kyriakos
They definitely worked on this at Microsoft. I am running the latest insider
build at home and compared to my works PC which is 2 official releases behind
its way snappier. Start menu pops up instantly, search finally works, the
button hover effects don't seem to miss frames anymore.

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Yetanfou
All this complaining about the latency and slowness of terminal applications
seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. Strangely enough I have yet to
experience this slowness, even though the newest piece of 'user-facing'
hardware I use is a 2004 ThinkPad T42p - not exactly a speed demon by modern
standards. Both the bare console as well as the multitude of terminal windows
are more than fast and responsive enough, had I not read about them supposedly
being sluggish I'd never have given it any thought. They still do not feel
sluggish to me so I wonder why others seem to experience them as being so. My
systems nearly all run some form of Linux with Xmonad and some parts of Mate,
_mate-terminal_ (i.e. Yet Another libvte terminal application) amongst them. I
regularly have about 30 terminal windows active spread over three workspaces
which I switch between without problems or lag. While terminal applications
might not be much faster than they were in '92 when I first started using
Linux and in that sense have gotten heavier and 'slower' they do seem to
perform well enough for me to use them without qualms.

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smacktoward
_> Of course this also means that we have trade offs. We don't support fully
international text like pretty much every other application will. RTL? No go
zone right now. Surrogate pairs and emoji? We're getting there but not there
yet. Indic scripts? Nope._

These seem like pretty major things to trade away, especially for something
that's as widely used around the world as Windows.

~~~
thezilch
This is a Linux terminal. I'd guess it see 99.99% ASCII. I think they have
bigger fish to fry.

~~~
anticodon
This is a very incorrect assumption. Everybody wants to be able to use native
language for program output and input, view and edit texts in native language
using less, sed, vim.

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adontz
Never had 200ms lag on stock Windows. I'd suspect 3rd party antivirus or data
loss prevention software to slow down everything except WSL console. Many
AVs/DLPs still can't look into WSL. They are all piece of crap rendering even
powerful PCs completely unusable, eating lots of processor cycles and disk
throughput in kernel, thus not visible to Task Manager.

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thecompilr
Windows PowerShell is also smooth as butter. After using it for a bit going
back to macos or linux terminals feels sluggish.

~~~
sebazzz
It should be, it is also conhost based. The effect mentioned is a conhost
thing, not WSL, powershell or any other thing that uses conhost. ubuntu.exe is
not a seperate terminal in that sense.

