I work for Microsoft. As you can imagine, this is a problem we have devoted a considerable amount of energy to thinking about. A lot of this discussion has revolved around comparisons to previous solutions (particularly Cygwin and Interix/SUA), but I think it's worth backing up and thinking about what the fundamental limitations of implementing something approaching POSIX compliance in userspace. I will try to tell the story more or less as it is told internally by the people who built these things from scratch.

To be transparent, I am sort of worried that the authors have told us in this thread that they think the number of applications that "really need" `fork` is small, and that the discussions about POSIX subsystems on Windows are overindexed on discussions about `fork` without justification.

The truth of the matter is that the semantics of `fork` infect every API that creates process state. Every library, every syscall that creates process state will have a clear answer for what happens when a process that is using that bit of process state calls `fork`. This includes file and socket management, IPC stuff, threads, signals, and so on. To make `fork` work properly on Windows, you absolutely need to replicate what UNIX does here, or you will break a lot of apps, because make no mistake, a lot of apps depend on these semantics to work correctly. `fork` is not just a function that occasionally gets called and sometimes needs to be fast for people who are calling it. It is core to the semantics of the POSIX API, and if you don't treat it as such you are in for a bad time later.

Perhaps more worrying, though, is that there is a serious impedence mismatch between the UNIX and Windows models of asynchrony. Particularly in the case of sockets and signals, this difference is immense, and I am extremely skeptical we will find a good (or even close to production-worthy) solution in usermode. Maybe these good folks have found something I have missed; to me the approach just seems doomed.

And of course, this is all just the start of the problem. It is a much longer trudge to solve the "real" problem, which is immense. The original Interix POSIX subsystem in NT 3.5 (I'm told) had a `fork` that was just barely enough to pass the 1003.1-1990 validation suite, and fell over quickly if you pushed much harder. But they didn't have to mess with the `fork` implementation to turn that 67kloc into the more robust and conformant SFU 3.x; it was mostly a long tail of things extrernal to fork that just needed to be ironed out.

On top of that, to really have `fork` interop, you would likely need to redefine every Win32 API so it did the "right thing" under UNIXy things like signal delivery and fork, and that is a truly, terrifyingly tall order.