Unixism N.
A Piece Of Code Or A Coding Technique That
Depends On The Protected Multi-tasking Environment With Relatively
Low Process-spawn Overhead That Exists On Virtual-memory Unix
Systems.
A piece of code or a coding technique that
depends on the protected multi-tasking environment with relatively
low process-spawn overhead that exists on virtual-memory Unix
systems. Common unixisms include: gratuitous use of
fork(2); the assumption that certain undocumented but
well-known features of Unix libraries such as stdio(3) are
supported elsewhere; reliance on obscure side-effects of
system calls (use of sleep(2) with a 0 argument to clue 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 free()ing memory. Compare vaxocentrism; see also
New Jersey.
