On 11/26/2018 11:40 AM, David Storrs wrote:
On Sun, Nov 25, 2018 at 4:16 AM George Neuner <gneun...@comcast.net <mailto:gneun...@comcast.net>> wrote:On 11/25/2018 4:11 AM, Bogdan Popa wrote:Is there a way to fork(2) in Racket?Unfortunately, no. Racket is cross-platform, and Windows doesn't have the concept of fork().As a point of information, Perl's approach is to make things available and add a note saying "This doesn't work on Windows because Windows is weaksauce doesn't support it." It's a balance between giving the user capabilities and protecting them from making mistakes.
Perl should talk ... it's the bastard child of BrainF*ck and line noise. It's a mystery to me how it became so popular.
Though I can appreciate the beauty of fork [after reading Bach's book], quite a lot of people thought fork was a stupid idea ... including the people, originally from DEC, who wrote Windows NT. Windows has evolved a bit since then, but internally you still can see quite a bit of similarity to VMS [which, like Unix, was very reliable and inspired legions of fans].
The guts of Windows are every bit of good as Unix ... it's the fluff Microsoft layered on top that is the problem.
I administered a mixed group of NT and 2K servers for over 10 years: running internet relay, DNS, file service, mail service, , source & document control, Sybase server, workgroup backup, and a pair of terminal servers hosting shared development tools. In all that time, there were only 2 crashes, both due to failing hard drives. The servers were rebooted once a year just for the heck of it, and a few times over their lives to install or upgrade software. Other than that, they ran 24/7.
Though I'm no longer dealing with Windows servers, I still know people who are. Not kidding, Windows is VERY reliable as long as you avoid running too many Microsoft applications on it.
During that same period I was developing industrial vision applications on Windows. I had multiple versions of Microsoft and Intel tool chains and SIMD libraries, etc. on my desktop, and I could lock up Windows with 10 lines of code (still works, btw!!!). But MSWord would crash on me at least once a week - it gave me far more grief than everything else put together.
I'm still using a Windows 7 desktop that runs for months at a time. It gets rebooted only to install or upgrade software [and I don't abide Microsoft's monthly update schedule - I consider OS updates if/when I need to do something else]. I still have Visual Studio, and Racket, and Python, and a few other things ... but I abandoned MSOffice for Libre long ago.
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