How Can I Get Child Process IDs After Forking in Go?

Forking Go Processes: How to Get Child Process IDs

In the quest to create new Go processes while obtaining their respective IDs, the exec and os libraries may seem lacking in their ability to facilitate forking. However, the solution lies within the syscall package and its syscall.ForkExec() function.

It's crucial to understand that fork() was initially conceived in an era devoid of threads, where processes possessed only a singular execution thread. Thus, forking was a straightforward operation. However, Go's heavy reliance on threads for goroutine scheduling complicates matters.

Forking and Go Concurrency

Forking in Linux under Go introduces a problem. The child process will inherit only the thread that initiated the fork, leaving out vital threads utilized by the Go runtime. Consequently, the child process cannot continue executing Go code, making an immediate exec(2) necessary. This is precisely the intended use case for syscall.ForkExec().

Beyond Forking in Current Times

Modern applications seldom require direct fork() calls. An expedient alternative for "best-effort asynchronous process state snapshotting" exists, as seen in Redis. This technique leverages the child process's inheritance of memory data pages from the parent, allowing it to save data structures to disk while the parent continues modifications in its own address space.

In all other scenarios, immediate execution is the preferred method, making libraries like exec.Command() more appropriate for creating and managing child processes in Go.

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