Re: First version of MinGW octave

[Paul Kienzle]

On Feb 15, 2006, at 12:03 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On 15-Feb-2006, David Bateman wrote:
>
> | However, fork is but it can be approximated with CreateProcess, 
> though
> | the cost will be higher as I think more of the process table is 
> copied...
>
> I don't think the Cygwin fork does any better.  As far as I know, it
> copies the complete parent process when creating the child.

You don't want fork on Windows.  For octave you want fork+exec,
which windows bundles as a separate call (which is what CreateProcess
above does, no?).  Listen() in octave-forge should be using threads
on Windows, but I think Octave has too many globals for that to be
practical.  In practice, I've found that fork doesn't work on enough
versions of Windows for the cygwin in octave2.1.50a.exe, so I usually
start it with "nofork".

In general, whether or not we want to invest the time to adjust Octave
to do things in the windows way is a separate question.  If the answer
is no, then the correct solution is to use cygwin for the ugly stuff.

- Paul