[Info-vax] What would you miss if DECnet got the chop? Was: "bad select 38" (OpenSSL on VMS)

[Scott Dorsey]

In article <nrs8db$jaq$1 at gioia.aioe.org>, Chris  <syseng at gfsys.co.uk> wrote:
>On 09/20/16 17:17, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>
>> fork() is not available on OpenVMS, and has little direct relationship
>> to the socket API. Code that uses fork() can range from fairly easy to
>> port, to basically impossible. The stuff that's easy to port doesn't
>> really use fork(), so it can be replaced with some combination of the
>> vfork() and exec() calls.
>
>Of course, i'm years out of date, but doesn't VMS have a spawn system
>call to set of a new new process ? I guess the question being if
>a spawned process inherits the parent environment or not.

That's part of it.  Spawn is also very very slow... Unix programmers just
fork() all over the place, but VMS programmers avoid spawning extra processes
if they can help it.  That's a design decision inherent in the OS.  There
are good and bad things about heavyweight processes but it's difficult porting
code from a system that uses lightweight processes.
--scott


-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."