Trent Mick wrote:
On Fri, Jul 28, 2000 at 12:21:08PM +0200, M . -A . Lemburg wrote:
IIRC ActiveState contributed to Perl a version of fork that works on Win32. Has anyone looked at this? Could it be grabbed for Python? This would help heal one of the more difficult platform rifts. Emulating fork for Win32 looks quite difficult to me but if its already done...
This would indeed be a *very* useful addition and help porting os.fork() applications to Win32. (Ok, in the long run they would have to be converted to multi-threaded apps due to the process creation overhead on Win32, but for short term porting to Win32 this would be a Cool Thing, IMHO.)
Can this code be grabbed from somewhere ?
It is all in ActivePerl. You can download the source code:
http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/Download.html
Thanks.
Besides, I would guess (and I *am* guessing, I don't know this) that the Perl fork stuff is fairly closely tied to Perl, i.e. it may not be easy at all to yank it out and plug it into Python.
However, I echo the Bill's and Guido's sentiments. Having a hacked emulation of fork encourages people to use it. Once someone has their favorite UNIX app it running on Win32 with the fake-fork they will have little incentive to port it properly using threads. There will then be calls to improve to Win32 fork implementation... and that is the wrong support path.
You're probably right... :-/ BTW, (pardon my ignorance) what is the most portable way to do the equivalent of a os.system("cmd &") as native OS API call ? [On Unix, "cmd &" starts a new process which runs in the background and detached from the calling process.] I've looked at .execve and .spawnve, but they both replace the current process. Thanks, -- Marc-Andre Lemburg ______________________________________________________________________ Business: http://www.lemburg.com/ Python Pages: http://www.lemburg.com/python/