It's tough to make this sort of thing cross-platform (at least where cross-platform includes Windows) because the Windows process model is a good bit different

It's tough to make this sort of thing cross-platform (at least where cross-platform includes Windows) because the Windows process model is a good bit different than *nix. So focusing on Unix (incl Linux and OS X) is probably the way to go here. Besides, nobody uses Windows for heavy lifting, do they? ;-)