Re^2: I prefer to:

[rinceWind]

in reply to Re: I prefer to:
in thread I prefer to:

You mention VMS. Surely you've heard of lib$spawn(), not to mention the DCL command spawn, which is the natural way of creating a subprocess to do something different from the parent (as distinct from launching a detached process, which is roughly the equivalent of a nohup). The posix layer implements fork, but this is not the native VMS way of doing or thinking about things.

Digital had a lot to do with the invention of threads. PThreads are a derivative of DecThreads, and VMS was one of the platforms on which they were originally targetted. The reason for this was that there is a substantial overhead in process creation - spawns were expensive, and threads provided a convenient way of multitasking inside a process's address space.

[jonadab]

Admittedly, my knowledge of VMS is less than my knowledge of most of those other systems, and I am pretty much an end user on that platform (inasmuch as there is any such thing as an end user on VMS). I really should turn on my Vax more often and play around with it more.