I have the entirely opposite opinion. IMO a big mistake of the UNIXy model is that so much state is preserved across the creation of a process. For example, there are APIs to have a specific thing be fd number 4 so you can run a program and have it find that thing at fd 4. This is weird.

Windows, for all its many, many faults, did not use fork+exec and instead mostly has options for how one creates a process. It wasn’t done elegantly, but it was the right decision.

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chasil 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Well, Cygwin and Busybox have shown me that fork-heavy activities are about 100x slower on Windows than Linux.

The Windows approach may be correct, but it suffers in performance from the POSIX perspective.

I have heard that WSL1 iimproves this.

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__david__ 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Having fd 4 mean something specific is no weirder than having fds 0,1, and 2 mean something specific, which is probably never going to change. At some point you just gotta embrace the Unix.

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1718627440 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is it weirder, that you can pass an variable precisely into argument 4? You do need to pass information to a subprocess and there needs to be some agreement on what means what. Sure, maybe you could use names instead of fds, but that sounds needlessly complicated.

	▲	jonhohle an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That’s like saying you could use positions to specify function argument access (as in assembly) instead of variable names. File descriptors being numbers that are likely array indexes in a file handle seems like a leaky abstraction. Having a namespace that a parent process share with its children seems like a much cleaner design.
	▲	amluto an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		A way to pass a defined list of handles to a subprocess (or a friendly other process) makes sense. Having that mechanism be direct inheritance of those handles with the same numbering as the source is obnoxious.

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burnt-resistor an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You're simply failing to grasp the value of the simplicity, compatibility, and portability of POSIX/*nix. Inventing yet another way to create a process would be complex and break things. It's a-la-carte to enable configuration after fork of the new CoW or non-CoW process but before exec (unless vfork or similar were used). This is the model.

If you want to greenfield re-engineer the world with all new system calls and a totally different execution model, feel free to go right ahead.

	▲	wvenable 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		"The reasonable man adapts himself to POSIX: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the POSIX to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." ― George Bernard Shaw, probably.