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0 pointskazinator7y ago0 comments

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.

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afiori7y ago· 2 in thread

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

kazinatorOP7y ago

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

afiori7y ago

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.

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