[Python-Dev] ActiveState & fork & Perl

[Fredrik Lundh]

Mark wrote:
> Excuse my ignorance, but how hard would it be to simulate/emulate/ovulate
> fork using the Win32 extensions?  Python has basically all of the native
> Win32 process API exposed, and writing a "fork" in Python that only forked
> Python scripts (for example) may be feasable and not too difficult.
> 
> It would have obvious limitations, including the fact that it is not
> available standard with Python on Windows (just like a working popen now
> :-) but if we could follow the old 80-20 rule, and catch 80% of the uses
> with 20% of the effort it may be worth investigating.
> 
> My knowledge of fork is limited to muttering "something about cloning the
> current process", so I may be naive in the extreme - but is this feasible?

as an aside, GvR added Windows' "spawn" API in 1.5.2,
so you can at least emulate some common variants of
fork+exec.  this means that if someone writes a spawn
for Unix, we would at least catch >0% of the uses with
~0% of the effort ;-)

fwiw, I'm more interested in the "unicode all the way
down" parts of the activestate windows project.  more
on that later.

</F>