object.enable() anti-pattern

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 1:33 AM, André Malo <ndparker at gmail.com> wrote:
> * Serhiy Storchaka wrote:
>
>> Another example is running a subprocess in Unix-like systems.
>>
>>      fork()
>>      open/close file descriptors, set limits, etc
>>      exec*()
>
> For running a subprocess, only fork() is needed. For starting another
> executable, only exec() is needed. For running the new executable in a
> subprocess fork() and exec() are needed. I think, that's a bad example.
> These APIs are actually well-designed.

That said, though, there's certainly plenty of room for one-call APIs
like popen. For the simple case where you want to start a process with
some other executable, wait for it to finish, and then work with its
return value, it makes sense to hide the details of fork/exec/wait -
especially since that simple API can be cross-platform, where fork()
itself is quite hard to implement on Windows.

ChrisA