WSL is decent now for web development!

You can also find this article on my blog.

At least with vscode. There might be other tools available but that’s the particular IDE that I’ve evaluated.

The extension that makes it possible

Given the currently 12,560,753 downloads for Remote-WSL (What’s going on there anyway? I’ve only ever met one engineer who uses Windows and WSL professionally. And don’t people who develop native software usually use Visual Studio? Maybe a ton of people who simply installed recommended extensions? 😅), maybe this isn’t news to many. Yet I only randomly learned about it through this article that has a whopping 5 likes (I recommend checking this out for more on WSL-related topics — although some of it is a bit outdated by now).

Why is that extension absolutely key? Well, while a ton of articles have been talking about how fast WSL 2 is for years, not as many mentioned that if you use it with the Windows file system (i.e. just using bash and staying on /mnt/C/… instead of going to ~), it absolutely cripples the performance. Which is why that is not included in my benchmarks below. Trying to work like that is a non-starter.

But since I’m not a fan of just statements that “it’s fast” or benchmarks that aren’t tied to a real world use case, let’s get to…

Benchmarks

OSes used:

• Windows 10
• Ubuntu 20.04.2 for WSL
• Linux Mint 20.2

Project used: Closed source, sorry (the vidIQ browser extension)

Typescript server restart time was measured by hand, using vscode’s “Restart TS server” command, waiting for errors to reappear.

Aside from these benchmarks, I also observed CPU usage while moving the cursor in vscode and it’s pretty much the same.

When first starting vscode with a WSL project, you’ll see “Vmmem” with pretty high CPU usage. That calms down (to 0.1–0.5% on my machine) after a minute or two.

Musings on related tools

While exploring the viability of WSL, I stumbled across Windows Terminal. Another hugely popular project but hey — maybe you also live under a rock, like me, apparently. 🙈😆 Anyway, great for managing Windows and Linux shells! (I just realized that Paddy mentioned this one too…)

Also, I’ve always found the methods of getting to an admin command prompt annoying. Gsudo makes it as straightforward as it is on Linux.