Comment by saagarjha

7 years ago

Yeah, if you're using Windows you aren't going to be able to use it. Or are you suggesting that Microsoft should implement posix_spawn?

6 comments

saagarjha

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tomjakubowski  7 years ago

Can't you use posix_spawn() with WSL and your favorite POSIX-compatible libc implementation?

  • Dylan16807  7 years ago

    Well that's a complicated question to answer.

    You can use the posix_spawn function in glibc, which uses a vfork or clone syscall just like on Linux.

    • acqq  7 years ago

      Also relevant, regarding the Linux native performance:

      https://mobile.twitter.com/RichFelker/status/602313979894038...

      "Rich Felker, May 24, 2015: Some interesting preliminary timing of @musllibc 's posix_spawn vs fork+exec shows it ~25x faster for large parent processes. (~360us vs 9ms). #glibc has a vfork-based posix_spawn but it's only usable for trivial cases; others use fork. @musllibc posix_spawn always uses CLONE_VM. This also means @musllibc posix_spawn will fill the fork gap on NOMMU systems cleanly/safely (unlike vfork) once we get NOMMU working."

      Also evilotto's post here:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19622477

      "a 100mb process generally takes >2ms to fork, while a 1mb or less process takes 70us"

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