https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...
Not true. There are increasingly more cases where Windows software, written with Windows in mind and only tested on Windows, performs better atop Wine.
Sure, there are interface incompatibilities that naturally create performance penalties, but a lot of stuff maps 1:1, and Windows was historically designed to support multiple user-space ABIs; Win32 calls are broken down into native kernel calls by kernel32, advapi32, etc., for example, similar to how libc works on Unix-like operating systems.
Also, as far as my (very limited) understanding goes, there are more architectural performance problems than just filters (and, to me, filters don’t necessarily sound like performance bankruptcy, provided the filter in question isn’t mandatory, un-removable Microsoft Defender). I seem to remember that path parsing is accomplished in NT by each handler chopping off the initial portion that it understands and passing the remaining suffix to the next one as an uninterpreted string (cf. COM monikers), unlike Unix where the slash-separated list is baked into the architecture, and the former design makes it much harder to have (what Unix calls) a “dentry cache” that would allow the kernel to look up meanings of popular names without going through the filesystem(s).
From there, it hits the MFT, finds the specific record for the file, loads the MFT record, and ultimately returns the FILE_OBJECT to the I/O Manager and it bubbles up the chain back to (presumably) Win32. The MFT is just a linear array of records, which include file and directories (directory records are just a record with directory = true, essentially).
Obviously simplified. Windows Internals will be your friend, if you want to know more.
[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/path-look...
[2] I was under the impression that it could look up an entire path at once when I wrote my grandparent comment; it seems I was wrong, which on reflection makes sense given you can move directories.
[3] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/path-look...
But there's another issue which is what cripples windows for dev! NTFS has a terrible design flaw which is the fact that small files, under 640 bytes, are stored in the MFT. The MFT ends up having serious lock contention so lots of small file changes are slow. This screws up anything Unixy and git horribly.
WSL1 was built on top of that problem which was one of the many reasons it was slow as molasses.
Also why ReFS and "dev drive" exist...
Ext4 also stores small (~150B) files inside the inode[1], and so do a number of other filesystems[2]? NTFS was unusually early to the party, but if you’re right that it’s problematic there then something else must also be wrong (perhaps with the locking?) to make it so.
[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/ext4/inli...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#All..., the “Inline data” column.