Creating child processes

Software development is no longer the realm of monolithic programs. Applications running on networks cannot forego interoperability. Modern applications are distributed and decoupled. We now build applications that connect users with resources distributed across the Internet. Many users are accessing shared resources simultaneously. A complex system is easier to understand if the whole is understood as a collection of interfaces to programs that solve one or a few clearly defined, related problems. In such a system it is expected (and desirable) that processes do not sit idle.

An early criticism of Node was that it did not have multicore awareness. That is, if a Node server were running on a machine with several cores, it would not be able to take advantage of this extra horsepower. Within this seemingly reasonable criticism hid an unjustified bias based on a straw man: a program that is unable to explicitly allocate memory and execution "threads" in order to implement...