There are some awful issues with WSL for now. It has a stack limit of 8MB which means certain programs that expect a >= 16MB stack won't work. ulimit refuses to increase the stack size.
Building things can be *incredibly* slow. Not that this shouldn't be a major issue for now, since it is supposed to run ordinary Ubuntu binaries. No need to build them specially for WSL. The Sage binary tarball takes 25 minutes to untar! I found a number of packages that seems to corrupt the .o files during the build process every now and again, requiring one to delete the .o files by hand and rebuild them. Of course this doesn't happen on real Ubuntu. However, it seems to only happen when doing a parallel build. We are getting lots of double free and corruption errors on code that works absolutely fine on real Ubuntu (though this might just be the memory manager being more sensitive to actual bugs), and spawning seems to result in a Not Enough Memory error no matter what. Moreover, one needs to download and install the Anniversary update, which takes hours, then one needs to enable developer tools, including the WSL. That takes ages to install. Then one needs to install Ubuntu, which takes quite a while in itself. It's Ubuntu 14.04 and many of the packages are quite old, e.g. gcc 4.8. So far I am not that impressed. However, it is marked beta, so I hope they will improve it over time. On the other hand, the ordinary Ubuntu-14.04 binary for Sage seems to actually work. It takes about a minute to start up the first time. As a timing comparison I did a Fateman polynomial benchmark on my 2 GHz Haswell laptop vs a 2.2 GHz K10 Ubuntu server. The timing on the laptop was 176s. On the server it took 169s. So that seems about right. A pearce polynomial benchmark took 95 s on the laptop and 85s on the server. So as far as I'm concerned compute performance is isomorphic, especially given that Sage was built from source on the server and I used a generic Sage binary on the laptop. And this is the first time ever that I have Sage at least partly working (maybe fully working) on my laptop! So that's really something. If anyone has any particular benchmarks or code they'd like me to try, I'd be happy to try it out. Note that one has access to the ordinary Windows file system, which people were worried about. And 'top' works. Microsoft are definitely on the right track here, but it still needs more work in my opinion. My guess is there's a small group within Microsoft responsible for this, and I'm sure they need the (moral) support of the Open Source community to keep going with this project, which is almost there. Maybe patience will pay off. Bill. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
