Here's some backstory:
* on macOS, @cole-miller and I noticed that since roughly Oct 2025, due
to some changes to latest macOS Tahoe, for any spawned child process we
needed to reset Mach exception ports
(https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/36754 +
6e8f2d2ebe)
* the changes in that PR achieve that via `pre_exec` hook on
`std::process::Command` which then abandons `posix_spawn` syscall for
`fork` + `execve` dance on macOS (we tracked it down in Rust's std
implementation)
* as it turns out, `fork` + `execve` is pretty expensive on macOS
(apparently way more so than on other OSes like Linux) and `fork` takes
a process-wide lock on the allocator which is bad
* however, since we wanna reset exception ports on the child, the only
official way supported by Rust's std is to use `pre_exec` hook
* posix_spawn on macOS exposes this tho via a macOS specific extension
to that syscall `posix_spawnattr_setexceptionports_np` but there is no
way to use that via any standard interfaces in `std::process::Command`
* thus, it seemed like a good idea to instead create our own custom
Command wrapper that on non-macOS hosts is a zero-cost wrapper of
`smol::process::Command`, while on macOS we reimplement the minimum to
achieve `smol::process::Command` with `posix_spawn` under-the-hood
Notably, this changeset improves git-blame in very large repos
significantly.
Release Notes:
- Fixed performance spawning child processes on macOS by always forcing
`posix_spawn` no matter what.
---------
Co-authored-by: Cole Miller <cole@zed.dev>
16dfc60ad2