I’ve speculated about that on lobste.rs before. To summarize a few thousand words of discussion: Windows supports legacy applications primarily via its elaborate kernel. A fully backwards compatible swap is out of the question.
I think the recent-ish Windows Long Term Service Branch/Channel gives Microsoft a path to switch the consumer Windows kernel to Linux, and put the NT kernel into full on maintenance mode. But perhaps developing WSL on NT will always cost less than a full kernel swap? Hard to say.
AF_UNIXis supported on Windows now too, and has some advantages over named pipes: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/af_unix-comes-to-windows/At the rate things are going, in 2024 Windows is just going to be a UI on top of the Linux kernel…
You use unix or you spend 30 years reinventingreinventing unix, they say…
I’ve speculated about that on lobste.rs before. To summarize a few thousand words of discussion: Windows supports legacy applications primarily via its elaborate kernel. A fully backwards compatible swap is out of the question.
I think the recent-ish Windows Long Term Service Branch/Channel gives Microsoft a path to switch the consumer Windows kernel to Linux, and put the NT kernel into full on maintenance mode. But perhaps developing WSL on NT will always cost less than a full kernel swap? Hard to say.
I think I’d be okay with that.
If you’re into this, highly recommend checking out Beej’s Guide to Network Programming!