> Somewhat irrelevant to this discussion given Windows lacks exec (starting a new executable requires a new process which gets a new PID), Well, you can do exe

> Somewhat irrelevant to this discussion given Windows lacks exec (starting a new executable requires a new process which gets a new PID), Well, you can do exec() on Windows if you implement it yourself in user space, see e.g. https://github.com/polycone/pe-loader https://github.com/polycone/pe-loader (a bit of a dated project, 32-bit only, but the I believe the same principles apply to 64-bit) Cygwin uses a hack – exec() creates a new Windows process, but every Cygwin process has two PIDs, a Windows PID and a Cygwin PID, so exec() changes the Windows PID but keeps the Cygwin PID the same – so it looks like an exec to Cygwin processes, but just like an ordinary spawn to non-Cygwin processes Less insane approach: if you put most of your code in a DLL, you can unload the DLL and then load a new version of it