On 19 Jan, 17:06, John Nagle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Paul Boddie wrote: > > Unlike your approach, pprocess employs the fork system call. > > Unfortunately, that's not portable. Python's "fork()" is > "Availability: Macintosh, Unix." I would have preferred > to use "fork()".
There was a discussion some time ago about providing a fork implementation on Windows, since Cygwin attempts/attempted to provide such support [1] and there's a Perl module which pretends to provide fork (using threads if I recall correctly), but I'm not sure whether anyone really believed that it was workable. I believe that on modern releases of Windows it was the ZwCreateProcess function which was supposed to be usable for this purpose, but you then apparently have to add a bunch of other things to initialise the new process appropriately. Of course, for the purposes of pprocess - providing a multiprocess solution which should be as easy to use as spawning threads whilst having some shared, immutable state hanging around that you don't want to think too hard about - having fork is essential, but if you're obviously willing to split your program up into different components then any of the distributed object technologies would be good enough. Paul [1] http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2002-01/msg01826.html -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
