I was going to cover this topic (the cost of starting/forking a process) in my original comment but decided it would be a bit tangential since I was able to mak

I was going to cover this topic (the cost of starting/forking a process) in my original comment but decided it would be a bit tangential since I was able to make my point without it. On Windows the cost of forking a process is high whereas on Unix/Linux it's low but on both platforms every application has a nontrivial startup time that will be significantly greater than a native call within an existing process.