On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 02:30:30PM +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
Is "forkProcess" in the sense of a Unix fork? If so, this is something that is difficult to do cleanly on Windows -- normally, it requires the full Cygwin emulating environment, which as far as I'm concerned is a killer for deploying applications. Theoretically, Windows NT kernel does have a facility to "clone" an entire process, complete with address space contents, but, as far as I'm aware this functionality is not exposed by the Win32 API.
I was mixed up and thinking about threads, which we do deal with via the win32 api. On windows we use system to emulate "fork and exec", which we *do* to via C and the FFI on POSIX systems. I suppose that "fork and exec" is easier to do on windows than a forkProcess itself, since the child doesn't need access to the parent's memory (except enough to redirect the stdio appropriately). -- David Roundy http://civet.berkeley.edu/droundy/