3 ms·

Nope. A strawman wrong doesn't justify anything related to the topic. fork() duplicates everything, which maybe overkill, which is why pthreads and vfork+exec a

• notacoward 7y ago
  That's not why pthreads exist, and vfork barely does. Pthreads exist to facilitate parallel operation (hence the name) on shared data, not as an efficiency measure. As for vfork, it has been deprecated since every UNIX implementation started marking pages as copy-on-write instead of actually copying. I was doing some of that work myself in 1990-91, so it's hardly new. The real problems with static linking don't have to do with fork, except in the sense of increasing reliance on VM overcommit (which IMO is a bad idea already). It's more to do with masking reuse of the same library across unrelated processes, as an efficiency issue but even more importantly in terms of tracking dependencies and updating software. No matter how good your configuration management (or similar mechanism) is, rebuilding large-N statically linked executables is less efficient and more error-prone than using the same information to update small-N shared libraries.