(Ignoring the typo of missing the 'n' in my alias ;->)

While fork can work great on Unix, it's not quite so great on other platforms. EMX on OS/2 (and maybe Win32) handles fork - but it's not really faster. I doubt ActiveState or Cygwin perls handle it (if either do, it'll be Cygwin). So you've simply hit another gotcha: cross-platform compatability. (Traversing @INC and using File::Spec is fast, tight on memory, and completely cross-platform!)

Even on Unix, fork may not be that great. Imagine an embedded perl. The main process (the embedder) has some cleanup in an atexit() in C. That cleanup may include committing or rolling back transactions, deleting temporary files that were in use, or other such behaviour. When you fork, and then the child exits, the atexit handler kicks in and does something like this - and now the parent process is going to be in a wierd place that is going to be really painful to debug. Especially if this ends up on a user's machine and the user imported your module. The C developer has no idea what is causing it, the perl user has no idea, and you're not really involved. Dangerous!

Fork is a dangerous tool - although it can be useful, you have to be really really careful of when you use it, and how you use it. Let's just stick to searching @INC. It's fewer lines of code, too ;-}

In reply to Re^2: Testing for a module's presence by Tanktalus
in thread Testing for a module's presence by Anonymous Monk

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