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

[John Reagan]

On Tuesday, September 20, 2016 at 5:06:56 PM UTC-4, Chris 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 Of course, i'm years out of date, but doesn't VMS have a spawn system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.
> 
> 

>From my experience, fork() usage falls into two categories.

1) I want to make a new process and run some other image on it.  That is the vfork()/exec() sequence.

2) I'm a really old program that is trying to roll-my-own threading package and I use fork() and hack up thread-local storage.  That code can be rewritten (moved forward a decade or two) and use a threading API.  However, TLS on our current compilers is less that is desired.