multiprocessing module (PEP 371)

[Paul Boddie]

On 4 Jun, 20:06, sturlamolden <sturlamol... at yahoo.no> wrote:
>
>                                                     Even a non-COWfork
> would be preferred. I will strongly suggest something is done to add
> support for os.fork to Python on Windows. Either create a full cow
> fork using ZwCreateProcess (ntdll.dll does support COWforking, but
> Win32 API does not expose it), or do the same as Cygwin is doing to
> fork a process without COW. Although a non-cow fork a la Cygwin is not
> as efficient as a fork on Linux/FreeBSD/Unix, it is still better than
> what pyprocessing is doing.

You seem to know more about this matter than the average person, I
would wager, so it might be an idea if you more than "strongly
suggest" something. ;-) I've looked at this situation briefly, I've
seen the different Cygwin-based techniques, and I've even gone as far
to investigate whether it's possible to write the necessary code using
the mingw32 stuff, although I don't think it actually worked when I
tested the executable on Windows. COW (copy-on-write, for those still
thinking that we're talking about dairy products) would be pretty
desirable if it's feasible, though.

Having said all this, I don't care about Windows myself, and my own
contribution to the collection of available libraries in this domain
has never been targeted at standard library adoption (nor thread API
compatibility) and thus has no need to run on Windows without Cygwin.

Paul