[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 .