Comment by jonhohle
1 day ago
Most programming languages abstract this out to be able to connect or drop the 3 standard pipes. Typically this is the only thing that can be shared anyway unless the other program is specifically shared and expects other file handles to be available, in which case fork might be the right system call anyway.
Right. It's not that fork is useless, it's that it's weird that it's the only way to do this thing that it isn't particularly well suited for.