The whole idea of having (awaitable) process descriptors in addition to PIDs is amazing. Suddenly, you don't need wait/waitpid/wait3/wait4/SIGCHLD or even PID 1. When the last process descriptor vanishes, the process itself can be purged from the process table.

And Win8 added nested jobs, so now you can basically have inescapable process groups with "if the leader process dies, terminate all its children and grandchildren" semantics. On Linux, I had to just give up and use Docker containers for this: some software simply insists on daemonizing itself too much, to the point that on receiving SIGTERM, it re-sends SIGTERM to everyone in its process group (including you, the unsuspecting parent. That was very "funny" to debug).

But of course, the downside of Windows is that the amount of legacy crap and weird quirks and incompatibilities is insane, even more than in x86. "The Windows low-level APIs wouldn't recognize "general" if it showed up in a uniform with stars on the shoulder." (c) njsmith