http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=424182


in reply to Things you need to know before programming Perl ithreads

Now you may wonder why Perl ithreads didn't use fork()? Wouldn't that have made a lot more sense? Well, I wasn't involved in the thread design process at the time, so I have no idea what the exact reasons were.

Hysterical raisins--surprisingly good ones, but still hysterical raisins. ithreads were originally developed to emulate fork(1) on Windows, which doesn't have such a call; thus, they couldn't be built on fork.

Besides, as your forks module demonstrates, most of the speed wins of using fork(1) on systems that have it would be lost in the interthread communications. The general consensus seems to be that you should use ithreads in code with a lot of interthread communications, a magic open (or such) in code with a little communication, and a raw fork in code with very little communcation.

=cut
--Brent Dax
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