Re: 32 bits time_t and Y2038 issue

On 2025-03-19, David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

There are certainly a few things that Cygwin can handle that msys2
cannot.  For example, cygwin provides the "fork" system call that is
very slow and expensive on Windows, but fundamental to old *nix
software.

I believe Windows inherited that from VAX/VMS via Dave Cutler.

Back when the Earth was young I used to do embedded development on
VMS. I was, however, a "Unix guy" so my usual work environment on VMS
was "DEC/Shell" which was a v7 Bourne shell and surprisingly complete
set of v7 command line utilities that ran on VMS. [Without DEC/Shell,
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have survived that project.] At one point I
wrote some fairly complex shell/awk/grep scripts to analyze and
cross-reference requirements documents written in LaTeX.  The scripts
would have taken a few minutes to run under v7 on an LSI-11, but they
took hours on a VAX 780 under VMS DEC/Shell (and used up ridiculous
amounts of CPU time). I was baffled.  I eventually tracked it down to
the overhead of "fork". A fork on Unix is a trivial operation, and
when running a shell program it happens a _lot_.

On VMS, a fork() call in a C program had _huge_ overhead compared to
Unix [but dog bless the guys in Massachusetts, it worked]. I'm not
sure if it was the process creation itself, or the "duplication" of
the parent that took so long. Maybe both. In the end it didn't matter:
it was so much easier to do stuff under DEC/Shell than it was under
DCL that we just ran the analysis scripts overnight.

--
Grant