The received wisdom suggests that Unix’s unusual combination of fork() and exec() for process creation was an
inspired design. In this paper, we argue that fork was a clever
hack for machines and programs of the 1970s that has long
outlived its usefulness and is now a liability. We catalog the
ways in which fork is a terrible abstraction for the modern programmer to use, describe how it compromises OS
implementations, and propose alternatives.
As the designers and implementers of operating systems,
we should acknowledge that fork’s continued existence as
a first-class OS primitive holds back systems research, and
deprecate it. As educators, we should teach fork as a historical artifact, and not the first process creation mechanism
students encounter.
Yeah, I was vaguely aware that fork()/exec() was not highly regarded these days. This is a kind of wild practical demonstration of the problems with it though.
For me the takeaway is that
fork()isn’t a great abstraction for spawning processes on modern OS’s.You might be interested in the paper “A fork() in the road”, from HotOS 2019 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/04/fork-hotos19.pdf), which argues:
Yeah, I was vaguely aware that
fork()/exec()was not highly regarded these days. This is a kind of wild practical demonstration of the problems with it though.