FYI:

• Win32 never generates SIGCHLD--or any other signal for that matter.
• the emulation of wait never waits.
• The emulation of waitpid is terminally broken.

  If you attempt to use it in the non-blocking mode waitpid( -1, WNOHANG) it returns:

  1. -1 when there are no children running
  2. 0 when there are children running (until...)
  3. -1 again when the maximum number of children (63) has been reached!

  The only way waitpid 'works', is when you call it to wait for a specific child.

  If you call it on a child that runs for a long time (or hangs), then everything just stops until that specific child exits or dies.

The Perl emulation of fork on win32 is so broken as to be almost entirely useless.

Its only saving grace is that it is responsible, in part at least, for the advent of iThreads. Without those, there would be no useable concurrency possible from Perl on win32.