alt Hacker NewsBecause that OS best practices is to use threads.
Traditionally Windows applications that create processes all the time come from UNIX heritage.
Contrary to UNIX, Windows NT was designed with threads first mentality, from the get go.
While on UNIX they were added after fact, and to this day there are gotchas mixing posix threads with signals, fork and exec.
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The problem is that threads are not fault boundaries but processes are. So they're not interchangeable when you care about resilience and misbehaving code.
Windows was designed with threads-first mentality because on pre-386 machines you don't have viable process memory protection, so your tasks share memory by necessity. This is not a great argument.
the only difference between a thread and a process on linux is how many structures they share. the function is identical.
A more accurate way to describe this is that Windows' (NT onward) core execution context model is a bunch of threads that by default share memory, whereas Unixen have a core task context model of a bunch of threads that by default do not share memory.
Both systems are implemented using threads as the execution context, but in Unix, the history means that that you fork+exec most of the time, resulting in a two tasks that do not share memory any more. By contrast, on Windows (NT onward) the common case when creating a new execution context is to create a thread that shares memory with others in its process.
Both systems allow the easy use of the other's core abstraction. On Unix, you can either code like its 1986 and use fork without exec, or use clone(3) or any of its higher level abstractions like pthreads.
You're right that POSIX semantics get tangled when using threads.