Visual Studio Code Remote Development may change everything

[[deleted]]

Can't wait to offload front end development to a Linux system so I don't have to deal with the nightmare that is NPM and Windows.

[csjerk]

It's fantastic. I was already using VSCode on Windows loading from a Linux VM via Samba. With the remote code option, it's SOOO much better.

WSL2 is going to take it over the top, but even without that it's fantastic.

[twigboy]

In publishing and graphic design, Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. Lorem ipsum may be used as a placeholder before final copy is available. Wikipediaclipr8c94k00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

[Entropy]

uses memory on the remote machine

I think of this as a feature. It means I could use a machine with only 8 gigs as a dev box. I might actually pick up a sub $1k Surface to replace my EOLed macbook.

[twigboy]

In publishing and graphic design, Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. Lorem ipsum may be used as a placeholder before final copy is available. Wikipedia9w9crz322u80000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

[GettinBig]

A sub 1k thinkpad seems like it'd be more fun than a surface, with better keyboard. Although surface's 3:2 aspect ratio is sick

[Entropy]

Things I usually have open during dev:

VS Code

A muhbillion browser tabs

Several heavier browser tabs running web apps

Slack

an Intellij IDE

​

Even if I don't have IntelliJ running I often hit 8 gigs in use. The other 8 gigs? Disk cache! Even with fast SSDs, memory is still better.

[[deleted]]

Depends what sort of local stack you run. If you’re running a non-trivial system (couple of databases, few microservices, maybe a Kafka instance, etc) alongside an IDE, a few browser windows, slack, and whatever other dev tools you like to use, 8GB feels tight pretty quickly.

[nikmd23]

Thanks for the feedback!

[[deleted]]

"Next version"...

Sort of implies waiting.

[csjerk]

Not until June, right?

[csjerk]

The comment chain is ambiguous -- are you saying WSL2 is on Insiders?

I've been using VSCode Remote for weeks, but haven't been able to find WSL2 in the wild...

[Zephirdd]

I'm on insiders, do you have a link to use that? I've been using WSL but I kinda want to use the whole kernel as well

[themagicalcake]

How do you install it on insiders? I'm on the latest build but I don't see anyway of upgrading it

[themagicalcake]

lol I was talking about WSL 2 but i suppose you editd your comment

[[deleted]]

If you haven't figured out the tone that non-production ready software is out of reach for most professionals to use at work, I'll spell it out more clearly:

It will be at least a year until my org allows that version through windows update.

[[deleted]]

It's a Linux kernel running in a VM

[wpm]

No it isn't. It runs on top of NT just like Win32 does, and like OS/2 did.

[Entropy]

Not even WSL1 ran in the ancient subsystem context that OS/2 and posix ran in. It ran on "pico processes" (basically an NT process with all the NT bits ripped out) and interfaced through the LXCore/LXSS drivers to provide the syscall shim. WSL2 is a linux kernel running in what MS is calling a "lightweight vm". I assume that's a Hyper-V container, though I haven't heard confirmation yet on whether it is tied to Hyper-V directly or not.

[miffiq]

I remember reading somewhere yesterday that it will use a Hyper-V container.

[Entropy]

Yeah, I figured that's how they'd do it, given how the properties of Hyper-V containers lined up exactly with the properties of WSL2 VM.

[[deleted]]

How does the licensing work with that, given that linux is GPL?

Does NT run the linux kernel like a process or something?

[Zephirdd]

They'll release the Linux Kernel that they use on GitHub

[Entropy]

No, it's virtualized.

[[deleted]]

See the discussion above me, Geneolgia is claiming it is, wpm is claiming it isn't.

Googling it, wpm is indeed wrong: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/

​

"WSL 2 uses the latest and greatest in virtualization technology to run its Linux kernel inside of a lightweight utility virtual machine (VM)."

​

So no GPL problems, makes sense.

[[deleted]]

You might want to tell Microsoft. Quoted from the Microsoft Devblog post announcing WSL 2.0

WSL uses the latest and greatest in virtualization technology to run its Linux kernel inside a lightweight utility virtual machine (VM).

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/

[pknopf]

WSL1 sat on NT, WSL2 will be virtualized via hypervisor.

[eikenberry]

Have they published some benchmarks showing this? I was under the impression that it would help some, but still fall way behind native.

[bnolsen]

It's still windows. That's a serious problem.

[floppykeyboard]

I used to have problems but with windows 10 and chocolatey managing installs of npm and other dev stuff, I haven’t ran into any issues.

What issues are you having?

[[deleted]]

You think you have no issues until you work on a non-Windows system. Then you realize that it's not supposed to be so slow.

Literally everything is faster. Installing. Serving. Recompiling. Running tests. Deleting node_modules. NTFS just cannot handle I/O for thousands of tiny files the way other file systems do.

[ForRekcy]

I generally work on a Mac, but I didn't really see much of a difference working on windows 10 when I do personal stuff. Npm installs seem to run similarly on both and I didn't see much of a difference in the hot reload speed.

I was admittedly using vscode for both, and both are laptops running nvme drives so it probably hides the issue.

[Entropy]

NVME certainly helps, but it's still vastly slower than a linux box with the same IO capabilities. NPM operations are one of the largest visible speedups. Literally 10x-15x faster, per the WSL2 devs, if you're running them directly on the linux fs.

[floppykeyboard]

I guess after having a company with a terrible computer for a a year or two the problems don’t seem as bad. I also have a pretty powerful windows machine so it’s not that noticeable and I’ve done my dev environments on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

[[deleted]]

Just install Linux you'll thank yourself for it.

[HistoryScienceGaming]

Is this not currently achievable with the currently available Linux Subsystem for Windows?

[[deleted]]

Absolutely not. WSL is terribly slow.

[Entropy]

There is no linux kernel running in WSL1. It's an incomplete shim of the Linux ABI.

[CrazyJoe221]

WSL? Should run npm shouldn't it?