README for forks

Copyright (c) 2002-2003 Elizabeth Mattijsen <liz@dijkmat.nl>. All rights
reserved.  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

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 less efficient in the stopping of threads
- it is less efficient in inter-thread communication

If for nothing else, it allows you to test out the Perl threading model,
even in older versions of Perl (you do _not_ require 5.8.0 for this).

The build is standard:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
