On Tuesday, 29 October 2013 at 03:44:37 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
There is no convenient function to replace the running process
with a new one. There used to be the exec() family of
functions, which conveniently use string[] for arguments etc.,
but now the doc says:
In addition to what Lars said, I'd like to add that replacing the
current process is a rather platform-dependent trick. While
process creation in POSIX is done by forking then replacing the
forked process with a new one, on Windows it's the other way
around - created processes are always isolated from the current
one, and Windows implementations of this function simply emulate
the behavior by creating a new process, then terminating the
current one.
I believe one of the goals of designing the new std.process is to
create an interface that would be as platform-independent as
possible. This meant that platform-specific functionality (which,
incidentally, seems to be rarely used in practice) was abstracted
away or scheduled for removal, delegating the task to such
platform-specific (= low-level) tasks to C bindings in std.c.*,
core.sys.* and core.stdc.*.
