From: Pat Eyler <pate@...>
Date: 2002-03-20T01:43:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Development of Windows version of Ruby

On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, Chris Gehlker wrote:

> On 3/19/02 9:05 AM, "Morris, Chris" <chris.morris@snelling.com> wrote:
>
> > Can I try to steer the thread here?
> >
> > The original post was that popen and fork don't work on Windows as of
> > 1.6.6-0.
> >
> > I tried popen on my Win95 box last night with 1.6.6-0 and it worked ... at
> > least for the Dir command. Does this mean it works for everything? (I'd
> > imagine so, but you know how computers are).
> >
> > fork is not implemented.
> >
> > Now, I've read other statements saying we're now missing 'all this cygwin
> > functionality' -- but I'm not experienced enough to know what that is. The
> > only solid things I've read is popen and fork. popen works, so then are we
> > simply left with fork?
> >
> > It seems to me we need to be discussing:
> >
> > (a) what Ruby should do with fork on Windows.
> > (b) what the other cygwin stuff we're missing is
> > (c) what Ruby should do with (b) on Windows if there's anything there.
> >
> > Chris
> >
>
> Windows is pretty much a mystery to me but I seem to remember a function
> called CreateProcess() that was at least roughly equivalent to fork(). Would
> that work?

IT's similar, except that a) it does what fork and exec do, and b) the two
processes are peers without the close relationship that parent/child
processes share.  I know that in the perl world, they (for various
definitions of they -- I think it might have been activestate) wrote their
own forkish thing to provide the functionality they wanted or used cygwin.

-pate

>
> This is all from fading memory of job a had porting code *from* Windows.
> There was a neat little program that defined all the Windows system calls. I
> substituted fork() for CreateProcess(), IIRC, and it worked.
>
> OT but kind of interesting recollection. The code I was porting was written
> in VC++. As a first step, I ported it to CodeWarrior for Windows by cleaning
> up the non-ANSI stuff. This version turned out to be so much quicker and
> more stable on Windows that the company I was contracting with released it.
>