> Oh I see. I guess your zygotes have developed more than mine. I think Google may have coined or at least popularized the term zygote for this in Chrome and Android, Chrome documentation [1] says:

Google may have popularized the term, but this approach was already in use by KDE developers in the KDE 2.x timeframe, where it was used as part of a system called kdeinit.

In this scheme, launching KDE apps from a KDE desktop could bypass much of the startup cost of dynamic linking by forking from a long-running kdeinit process (with kdeinit itself deliberately linked to all large dependency libs like Qt and kdelibs), dynamically loading the application logic (stored as a .so) and then launching the app.

This was more to save startup time due to how long it took to dynamically resolve a multitude of C++-based symbols back then, all the common logic came before the app's own main() would ever be called. But it did also save a bit of memory as well.