martillo@athena.mit.edu (Yakim Martillo) (06/18/87)
Just out of curiosity, a lot of the posters have referred to the tremendous overhead of unix processes. While I grant that there is overhead associated with Unix processes, the other two operating systems I know best and despise a lot more (VMS and Multics) have far more overhead associated with processes and generally really discourage the user from spawning a new processes. In both cases the command interpreter loads the procedures which the use wants to invoke and then directly calls the users routines. Basically there is only one process, the command interpreter. If you like this sort of environment you can always write a unix shell which will work this way. Of course pipelining processes becomes impossible. With VMS and Multics its fairly hard to disassociate a process from the terminal. I think it may actually be impossible in the case of Mulics to disassociate the process completely. I find this limitation sort of a pain.