Brian Jepson writing about the Windows Subsystem for Linux:
But there’s a lot more going on. First, WSL is really a new infrastructure for Windows that implements a Linux kernel-compatible ABI (Application Binary Interface). It allows Windows to run unmodified ELF-64 binaries, and is distribution-agnostic. When you configure it, WSL downloads and runs an (unmodified!) Ubuntu cloud image, but WSL is designed to support other Linux distributions as well. There are a few system calls not yet implemented, but that list gets smaller and smaller with each Insider Preview Release of Windows.
Much of what Jepson discusses here is above my pay grade, however, in the most simple terms, this is what the WSL is. WSL, allows any Unix distro to "talk" to Windows in such a way that makes the Unix kernel indistinguishable for an actual Linux kernel. So a Linux app doesn’t need to be modified at all to run on Windows 10 with WSL enabled. And while there are some things that still don’t work on WSL that list is shrinking fast.
We’ve been using WSL at Condron Media for weeks and have had great success. We’ve run into a few snags but Tucker Hottes has reported those via Twitter and oftentimes sees an update to Windows within a week or so. Microsoft is really killing it with this.