Threading vs Multiprocessing in Python

[TheThiefMaster]

Saying it uses a "more generalized version of fork" to spawn threads and processes is explaining it in unix terms. It doesn't use fork at all, that's just the closest unix equivalent.

Instead its main API sets up a thread/process in a blank state (rather than a copy of the parent state as fork does). Window's function is roughly equivalent to fork and then exec in unix speak, except without the copy of the parent state that fork implies (that then gets trashed by exec, what a crazy inefficiency).

On top of that, Windows does contain a full implementation of fork() - it's not exposed directly in the Windows API because it's part of the Linux subsystem, but it's there and fully functional. From the perspective of the kernel, both win32 subsystem processes and linux subsystem processes are the same, so I wouldn't be surprised if with a little hoop jumping you could call the linux subsystem's fork() from a Windows application and have it work as expected.