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From: martillo@athena.mit.edu (Yakim Martillo)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: Microsoft OS/2 -- Ideal for Ada
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Date: Wed, 17-Jun-87 18:13:55 EDT
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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.