Apologies in advance is this is ill-thought-out or uninformed:
My understanding is that Scsh process control is based on UNIX-style
fork(), which may be problematic for non-UNIX OS's, and has potential
implementation inefficiencies, depending on the underlying Scheme
implementation and the OS's further-underlying implementation of
fork.
In most cases, I'd think you could do just as well to use a spawn()
primitive, which spawns a process that doesn't have a copy of lots
of the spawner's state. (E.g., if I just want to create a process
to run some utility as a stream filter.)
I'd think that spawn could be more portable than fork. Under UNIX,
you could have a little parent process that you ask to fork copies
of itself when you want to spawn. The real scsh process would use that
little process as a process creation server.
Comments welcome.
--
| Paul R. Wilson, Comp. Sci. Dept., U of Texas @ Austin (wilson@cs.utexas.edu)
| Papers on memory allocators, garbage collection, memory hierarchies,
| persistence and Scheme interpreters and compilers available via ftp from
| ftp.cs.utexas.edu, in pub/garbage (or http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/wilson/)
|