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Posts uit oktober, 2018 tonen

A future for fork(2)

Hi hackers. Today I want to write about a new functionality that I've been developing for MoarVM that has very little to do with the JIT compiler. But it is still about VM internals so I guess it will fit. Many months ago, jnthn wrote a blog post on the relation between perl 5 and perl 6. And as a longtime and enthusiastic perl 5 user - most of the JIT's compile time support software is written in perl 5 for a reason - I wholeheartedly agree with the 'sister language' narrative. There is plenty of room for all sorts of perls yet, I hope. Yet one thing kept itching me: Moreover, it’s very much the case that Perl 5 and Perl 6 make different trade-offs. To pick one concrete example, Perl 6 makes it easy to run code across multiple threads, and even uses multiple threads internally (for example, performing optimization and JIT compilation on a background thread). Which is great…except the only winning move in a game involving both threads and  fork()  is not to pl