@bitcrazed @shanselman a few months ago we upgraded Discourse to use: https://github.com/Shopify/bootsnap
This heavily reduced file IO during boot which results in acceptable albeit a bit a bit slower boot performance on Windows in WSL.
Locally I see Discourse boot times of
- 2.2 seconds on a VMWare Ubuntu VM
- 4.5 seconds on the same machine in WSL
Without bootsnap I was seeing 31 second boot times!
This is quite enormous! It means that WSL is an acceptable option for local development of Discourse (and other Rails applications).
Sure it can be faster but given how ubiquitous, integrated and easy to set up it is this is an endorsable option! Also, keep in mind, Rails is embracing bootsnap and will ship with it from the next version onwards!