Cygwin alongside WSL

[Michael Enright]

On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 5:38 AM, KARL BOTTS <kdbotts@usa.net> wrote:
>
> Does anybody have any concrete experience using Windows Subsystem for Linux
> (hence WSL) on the same machine, alongside Cygwin?
>

Yes. I have. I assume you are soliciting some descriptions of people's
experience.

I have various projects which come from various git repos. I use
Eclipse CDT to edit these most of the time. This makes it a little
tricky to use WSL.

I use Cygwin, 64-bit version, when I have to do checkouts or pushes,
and I do this from a Cygwin mintty bash session. This puts my files in
a subdirectory of $HOME in Cygwin.

I use WSL to build and execute my programs. I generally would be using
a straight g++ command to build, or CMake. Eclipse, which we may think
of as an "ordinary Windows program" for this discussion, cannot access
files in the WSL filesystem without using unsupported tricks, so
that's why I don't keep my files under WSL's filesystem. On the other
hand, using WSL I have less differences with Debian. Since the
projects are not meant to support "all POSIX systems" or "Cygwin and
Linux", these things give me what I need.

Most of the time I don't run into differences between Cygwin and WSL,
because I don't go into the areas where they do differ. I have done a
few graphical projects but they output to raster files instead of the
screen.

The biggest problem in this is Eclipse, and indeed the complete lack
of a decent graphical IDE for WSL. This means that the most useable
configuration for Eclipse is to define the project as a Cygwin
project, which will have minor differences with Ubuntu. The two have
different schedules for updating the C++ compiler, CMake, and so on.
Also most IDEs default to cr-lf line separators when they run on
Windows. But at least Eclipse can be configured to newline separators.
Some IDE's do not allow themselves to be configured 'non-native'.

The Windows boxes in question are allowed to update themselves
overnight and I run the usual update commands on WSL itself. I haven't
found this update policy to interfere with my work so far.

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