← Back to context

Comment by kazinator

7 years ago

It's an idiotic argument. Only functions compose. Though fork is packaged as a function, it's really an operator with a big effect.

Booting a system doesn't compose; let's not have power-on reset and bootloaders.

Everything in this paper could have been cribbed from twenty year or older Usenet postings, mailing lists and other sources. Fork has been dissected ad nausem; anyone who is anyone in the Unix-like world knows this.

Oh, and threads have perpetually been the way to go on current hardware --- every damn year since 1988 and counting.

Also levels of abstraction compose.

> Booting a system doesn't compose;

Actually this is false, virtual machine and hypervisors allow to boot a system inside another system

  • Virtual machines can be forked processes, and contain operating systems with forked processes, some of which are virtual machiens ... fork composes!

    • as a function obviously, the point is that it does not compose easily with other abstractions. That is every other library and OS functionality needs to be fork-aware.

      spawn do not have this requirement.

      3 replies →