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by cygx 5108 days ago
> Windows lacks fork(), or at least it's not documented.

The NT kernel supports forking, but the Win32 subsystem does not. Because Interix lives outside the Win32 subsystem, it can provide a proper fork() implementation, whereas Cygwin has to live with its somewhat brittle emulation.
1 comments
voltagex_ 5107 days ago
Maybe I misunderstand this, but couldn't someone write a driver for Cygwin to have a better fork implementation?
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cygx 5107 days ago
As I understand it, the problem lies with making the different subsystems interact: Forking itself is reasonably easy using NtCreateProcess(), but the Win32 subsystem won't know how to deal with the forked process and stuff will break, including console output.

I don't see Microsoft adding forking support to the Win32 subsystem any time soon, so you'd end up rewriting Cygwin from scratch by reverse engineering Interix...

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