I would suggest to provide a function indicating if you are running on a POSIX platform: bool is_posix_platform(); if ( boost::process::is_posix_platform() ) { ... } The lib could provide an encapsulation for testing the exit code against WIFEXITED, WEXITSTATUS, WIFSIGNALED, WTERMSIG, WIFSTOPPED, WSTOPSIG, WIFCONTINUED, WCOREDUMP (as the old version of boost.process did). posix_status ps( status); if ( ps.terminated() ) int sig = ps.termination_signal(); if ( ps.has_coredump() ) ... Sending signals (SIGSTOP, SIGCONT, SIGKILL, etc.) to the process would also be usefull. You could raise an assertion (BOOST_ASSERT) if this functionality will be invoked by a non-POSIX platform.