Comment by MBCook
1 day ago
Fork/exec is great if you actually want the traditional copy of your process for some reason.
For launching something totally new, like the example in the article of some tool calling git, I think it does make a ton of sense to make something new.
Especially since I suspect that is by far the more common case. I suspect “I want a clone of me“ is relatively rarely used at this point.
Relatively rarely, but in some performance sensitive use cases. Mine happens to be fuzzers, where a very cheap fork-like primitive would be a really big win.
Android and chrome both benefit greatly from fork exec as part of their zygote model iirc. It substantially reduces the memory cost and latency of spawning new apps and tabs.