Unixism
<operating system, jargon> A piece of code or a coding technique that
depends on the protected multitasking environment with relatively low
process-spawn overhead that exists on virtual-memory Unix systems.
Common Unixisms include: gratuitous use of "fork"; the assumption that certain
undocumented but well-known features of Unix libraries such as "stdio" are
supported elsewhere; reliance on obscure side-effects of system calls (use of
"sleep" with a 0 argument to tell the scheduler that you're willing to give up
your time-slice, for example); the assumption that freshly allocated memory is
zeroed; and the assumption that fragmentation problems won't arise from never
freeing memory.
Compare vaxocentrism. See also New Jersey.
[Jargon File]
(1995-02-27)
Nearby terms:
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