On Friday, 20 February 2015 at 22:07:56 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
AFAIK, in early days of unix there were no threads, processes were single-threaded, fork was the way to concurrency and exec was the most efficient way to run a program in memory-constrained conditions of 70s (kbytes of RAM!). Plain unix-like single-threaded processes, plain C heap, which didn't serialize access, because no threads, and worked fine with just virtual memory, which fork got right. That's the model, which should work the best with fork+exec.
Indeed, actually, not only for the early days, but for the first 20 years or so! :-D
Single thread, C, fork and a pipe + limited use of shared memory is a quite clean model. The underlying principle in Unix is to build complex software from many isolated simple units.
This robust philosophy somehow got lost in the quest for bleeding edge.
