The forks.pm module is a drop-in replacement for threads.pm. It has the same syntax as the threads.pm module (it even takes over its namespace) but has some significant differences: - you do _not_ need a special (threaded) version of Perl - it is _much_ more economic with memory usage on OS's that support COW - it is more efficient in the startup of threads - it is slightly less efficient in the stopping of threads - it is less efficient in inter-thread communication If for nothing else, it allows you to use the Perl threading model in non-threaded Perl builds and in older versions of Perl (5.6.0 and higher are supported).