I haven't seen any "advertising" for fork() on Win32

By "as advertised", I didn't mean "as advertised specifically for Win32" but more like "as explained in standard documentation, such as the Camel book". I learned Perl from the 2nd ed. Camel while I was still using Windows 95 OSR2, with ActivePerl, and fork *seemed* to work for me, although I never used it extensively.

It cannot work well with sockets and it has problems when running longer processes.

Ah. I was not aware of these limitations. I knew that fork didn't work on DOS, but I was not aware that it had issues on Windows.