Apparently kpathsea, which is a C library, shells out to implement some functions. That's where their (unclear) comment on forking comes from.

This comment from the previous post indicates that it might not be such a big deal to fix this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3264887

The whole thread on their earlier post is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3264341

Alas, it is not particularly enlightening.