[Python-Dev] Pythonic concurrency - offtopic (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Fri Oct 14 07:11:49 CEST 2005

Sokolov Yura <falcon at intercable.ru> wrote:

Offtopic: Microsoft Windows [Version 5.2.3790] (C) Copyright 1985-2003 Microsoft Corp. G:\Working\1>c:\Python24\python Python 2.4.1 (#65, Mar 30 2005, 09:13:57) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> from os import fork Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? ImportError: cannot import name fork >>>

Python for Windows, if I remember correctly, has never supported forking. This is because the underlying process execution code does not have support for the standard copy-on-write semantic which makes unix fork fast.

Cygwin Python does support fork, but I believe this is through a literal copying of the memory space, which is far slower than unix fork.

Until Microsoft adds kernel support for fork, don't expect standard Windows Python to support it.

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