[lawl]

> Just as a programming course would not today begin with goto, we suggest teaching either posix_spawn() or CreateProcess(), and then introducing fork as a special case with its historic context (§2).

Or CreateProcess(), which has a lot to do with microsoft.

[saxonww]

It really doesn't. Microsoft employs a guy named Dave Cutler who is credited with leading the development of Windows NT in the late 80s/early 90s. They hired him from DEC, where he... is credited with co-leading a research project that later became VMS. If you go look at OpenVMS programming manuals, you will see process creation calls (e.g. SYS$CREPRC, LIB$SPAWN) that look and behave a lot like CreateProcess().

I think it's well-known that Windows NT took a lot of ideas from VMS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/process... https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/OVMSDOC073/v73/5932/5932... http://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/OVMSDOC073/v73/5841/5841p...

I don't think we should ever forget how MS behaved through the mid 2000s. But we don't live in that world anymore, they aren't (capable of being) that company anymore, and I think we're at a point where dismissing research because of a connection to MS is not protecting anyone from anything.

[evilotto]

> I think it's well-known that Windows NT took a lot of ideas from VMS.

Has the old theory that "Windows NT" aka "WNT" = "VMS + 1" ever been proved or disproved?

[fredoralive]

The fact it was called "NT OS/2" before Windows NT seems to indicate it was a happy accident.

(https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma... the Smithsonian has early design docs with the original name on the spine).

[saagarjha]

Yeah, if you're using Windows you aren't going to be able to use it. Or are you suggesting that Microsoft should implement posix_spawn?

[tomjakubowski]

Can't you use posix_spawn() with WSL and your favorite POSIX-compatible libc implementation?

[Dylan16807]

Well that's a complicated question to answer.

You can use the posix_spawn function in glibc, which uses a vfork or clone syscall just like on Linux.

[acqq]

Also relevant, regarding the Linux native performance:

https://mobile.twitter.com/RichFelker/status/602313979894038...

"Rich Felker, May 24, 2015: Some interesting preliminary timing of @musllibc 's posix_spawn vs fork+exec shows it ~25x faster for large parent processes. (~360us vs 9ms). #glibc has a vfork-based posix_spawn but it's only usable for trivial cases; others use fork. @musllibc posix_spawn always uses CLONE_VM. This also means @musllibc posix_spawn will fill the fork gap on NOMMU systems cleanly/safely (unlike vfork) once we get NOMMU working."

Also evilotto's post here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19622477

"a 100mb process generally takes >2ms to fork, while a 1mb or less process takes 70us"

[Dylan16807]

Glibc got its main clone-based implementation in 2016, so it should be much more competitive now.

[JdeBP]

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18073906 .

[Dylan16807]

It's just the equivalent, not EEE.