[Python-Dev] ActiveState & fork & Perl

[Mark Hammond]

> > In case you haven't heard about it, ActiveState has
> recently signed a
> > contract with Microsoft to do some work on Perl on win32.
>
> Have I ever heard of it! :-)  David Grove pulled me into one of his
> bouts of paranoia.  I think he's calmed down for the moment.

It sounds like a :-), but Im afraid I dont understand that reference.

When I first heard this, two things sprung to mind:
a) Why shouldnt Python push for a similar deal?
b) Something more interesting in the MS/Python space is happening anyway,
so nyah nya nya ;-)

Getting some modest funds to (say) put together and maintain single
core+win32 installers to place on the NT resource kit could only help
Python.

Sometimes I wish we had a few less good programmers, and a few more good
marketting type people ;-)

> Anyway, I doubt that we coould use their code, as it undoubtedly
> refers to reimplementing fork() at the Perl level, not at the C level
> (which would be much harder).

Excuse my ignorance, but how hard would it be to simulate/emulate/ovulate
fork using the Win32 extensions?  Python has basically all of the native
Win32 process API exposed, and writing a "fork" in Python that only forked
Python scripts (for example) may be feasable and not too difficult.

It would have obvious limitations, including the fact that it is not
available standard with Python on Windows (just like a working popen now
:-) but if we could follow the old 80-20 rule, and catch 80% of the uses
with 20% of the effort it may be worth investigating.

My knowledge of fork is limited to muttering "something about cloning the
current process", so I may be naive in the extreme - but is this feasible?

Mark.