WSL vs crossword-composer

WSL

Source code behind the Windows Subsystem for Linux documentation. (by MicrosoftDocs)

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Source Code

docs.microsoft.com

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crossword-composer

Constraint solver for word games. (by paulgb)

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Source Code

crossword.paulbutler.org

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WSL		crossword-composer
	Project
25	Mentions	1
1,839	Stars	43
1.4%	Growth	-
8.9	Activity	0.0
10 days ago	Latest Commit	about 1 year ago
PowerShell	Language	Rust
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later	License	MIT License

The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

WSL

Posts with mentions or reviews of WSL. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-13.

Windows VBS
1 project | /r/ValorantTechSupport | 3 Jul 2023
[Bashonubuntuonwindows] \"Veuillez activer la fonctionnalité Windows Virtual Machine Platform et vous assurer que la virtualisation est activée dans le BIOS.\ »
2 projects | /r/enfrancais | 13 Mar 2023
Why do I get two different results from different PCs
1 project | /r/bashonubuntuonwindows | 26 Feb 2023
can't use WSL2 despite virtualization and Windows machine platform feature enabled, and error message says thye're not.
1 project | /r/WindowsSubsystemLinux | 3 Feb 2023

I have found some documentation here https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/issues/536 and here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/faq#will-i-be-able-to-run-wsl-2-and-other-3rd-party-virtualization-tools-such-as-vmware--or-VirtualBox and intend to read them fully including the links inside them tomorrow or the day after when I have time.
There are literally no reasons to choose an iPhone over an Android smartphone
5 projects | /r/unpopularopinion | 20 Dec 2022

Off the top of my head was this bug that caused a lot of people using vbox to swap to vmware. Just a bunch of really annoying compatibility bugs that made it a nightmare if you were trying to use it like a native linux instance.
Is Microsoft's CBL-Mariner Going to Become Microsoft Linux?
1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Nov 2022

>and I’m almost certain that when you run multiple wsl distros they are all in one VM, though that may be wrong
Yes, they run as containers.
From https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/issues/1573#issuecommen...:
WSL distributions (instances) are not VMs. They are best described as "containers" running inside the WSL2 VM. Each WSL2 distribution/instance has its own isolated:
PID namespace
Unable to run any docker container using WSL2
1 project | /r/docker | 12 Oct 2022

(As I've understood, Hyper-V Management Tools should not be needed when using WSL2, based on: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/issues/899)
Kernel Panic when trying to install AlmaLinux 9 in VirtualBox
1 project | /r/AlmaLinux | 1 Jun 2022

Here https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/issues/536
Docker for Windows failing to start: "WSL system related access rights are not set correctly"
1 project | /r/docker | 27 Apr 2022
AlmaLinux / WSL2 / Start Apache
1 project | /r/AlmaLinux | 17 Apr 2022

crossword-composer

Posts with mentions or reviews of crossword-composer. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-02-27.

WebAssembly
9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2021

A few wasm projects I've worked on:
- An in-browser crossword puzzle generator: https://crossword.paulbutler.org/ (source: https://github.com/paulgb/crossword-composer)
- A multi-player word game: https://redwords.paulbutler.org/
- A library for synchronizing state between clients, used for that word game: https://aper.dev/ (source: https://github.com/aper-dev/aper very WIP right now)
In my experience, the single biggest perk of using WebAssembly is that I can use a language I'm very productive in (Rust) compared to JavaScript. Everything else is secondary. That said, I think these projects have specific advantages by virtue of being WebAssembly:
- The backtracking search used for the crossword puzzle generator is carefully implemented to not allocate extra memory. This would be tough to do in JavaScript, and I believe it's partly responsible for its performance.
- The word game uses a compression algorithm that benefits very noticeably from wasm-opt, to the point that I can't run it without it. Given that wasm-opt takes a non-trivial amount of time at compile time, I suspect the JavaScript JIT would be slow at doing something similar at runtime. This is just conjecture, I haven't checked.
- What Aper does just wouldn't be possible without Rust features like Serde and macros.