Re: Is there any easy way to fork in elisp? Why not?

[Stefan Monnier]

> If the server could just fork, eval the request, return it, and die,
> everything would be easy and painless.
>
> The fork API could be:
> ```
> (let-fork ((some_val (expensive_compute)) ...)
>  (lambda()
>    (message "Computed: %s" some_val)))
> ```

We should indeed add such support in core.  Currently the `async`
package offers such functionality, but I think this belongs in core.

More generally a kind of "Emacs batch server" will be useful.
Something similar to the server.el but whose purpose would be to launch
independent/fresh batch Emacs sessions efficiently.

A long time ago I suggested to add support for the `fork`
POSIX primitive which could be ideal for that, but AFAIK it's hard to
provide such a functionality in w32, so we'd want the Lisp-level API not
to be tied to the semantics of POSIX `fork`.


        Stefan