Feature Request: Support for exec(3) family of functions

[nrser]

Request to add support for exec(3) family of functions.

Filed in response to the discussion at

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/exec.3.html

Thoughts & Notes

As a user it would be great if the implementation mirrored os/execute for simplicity and ease of recall, choosing which of the exec family (execl, execlp, ..., execvpe) to invoke "under the hood" based on the provided options.

I'm always found it tiring and error-prone how Python for example exposes each of the exec family directly, opposed to say Ruby which exposes a single method that makes the common, Bash-like use case easy.

[bakpakin]

I think the ask here is more about exec as a function than can be used to replace the current process, like exec in the shell, rather then spawn a subprocess. This works on most systems besides windows, and is not unreasonable.

There was discussion on matrix, the link in the original comment is perhaps a mistake?

[sogaiu]

For reference, here is some previous related discussion. Perhaps that was the intended link in the original post (^^;

[bakpakin]

I had already been working on os/posix-fork this weekend, and just finished an implementation os/posix-exec.

As noted though, these are not totally portable and will never exist on windows. There may also be other systems that cannot support them. Current implementation just checks #ifndef JANET_WINDOWS, but perhaps we should put them behind a configuration flag