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 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).