threading and multicores, pros and cons

[Paul Boddie]

On 15 Feb, 00:14, "sjdevn... at yahoo.com" <sjdevn... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Yeah, it's the Window equivalent to fork.  Does true copy-on-write, so
> you can do efficient multiprocess work.

Aside from some code floating around the net which possibly originates
from some book on Windows systems programming, is there any reference
material on ZwCreateProcess, is anyone actually using it as "fork on
Windows", and would it be in any way suitable for an implementation of
os.fork in the Python standard library? I only ask because there's a
lot of folklore about this particular function (everyone seems to
repeat more or less what you've just said), but aside from various
Cygwin mailing list threads where they reject its usage, there's
precious little information of substance.

Not that I care about Windows, but it would be useful to be able to
offer fork-based multiprocessing solutions to people using that
platform. Although the python-dev people currently seem more intent in
considering (and now hopefully rejecting) yet more syntax sugar [1],
it'd be nice to consider matters seemingly below the python-dev
threshold of consideration and offer some kind of roadmap for
convenient parallel processing.

Paul

[1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2007-February/070939.html