I spent some time digging into the internal mechanics of process creation. It's one thing to call gcc or click 'Run', but I wanted to document the actual transition from a static binary on disk to the memory layout of a live process.

I tried to contrast the POSIX fork/exec model with the Windows CreateProcess approach. I’d love to hear from anyone who has had to deal with the more obscure parts of these system calls, like clone() flags or Windows process attributes.