OS hackers: have you ever thought about how fork() is deeply peculiar? For HotOS, @jappavoo, @okrieg, Mothy Roscoe and I wrote a polemic about fork: its quirky history, the problems it causes today, and why after 50 years it may be time to deprecate it.https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/a-fork-in-the-road/ …
-
Show this thread
-
Replying to @0xabU @johnregehr and
Yes, I've raised a lot of fuss about this. fork without exec is awful and should be treated as deprecated. posix_spawn should be preferred, enhanced to address deficiencies.
2 replies 0 retweets 11 likes -
Replying to @RichFelker @0xabU and
I couldn’t agree more. It’s really telling that no managed language with threads that I’m aware of even exposes fork.
1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes -
Replying to @pcwalton @RichFelker and
I thought so too, and I was going to make that argument in the paper, but you'd be surprised how many languages do jump through hoops to enable some kind of fork(). By my count it includes at least Perl, Python, OCaml, Haskell and Ruby. (And, notably given its origins, *not* Go.)
2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes -
I've used fork() many times, happily from Perl

1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
perl -e “fork while fork”
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.