I have used Parallel::ForkControl before and it seemed to work fine. On the other hand, I was only running a max of 5 children at the time, so didn't run into the possible fork-bomb issues mentioned in the manpage.

I think Parallel::ForkControl is useful for those who want to code fast, or don't want to dive into Unix processes too deeply. Parallel::ForkManager, in exchange for a bit more code, offers finer-grained control of the forking and reaping process. If I had a small number of parallel non-interacting children processes to execute, I'd be fine with Parallel::ForkControl. But if the children depended on one another in some way or I needed to spawn a lot of processes, I'd want the control of Parallel::ForkManager