I fail to answer the first question (while I'd guess kre can), but the answer to the second is most probably that ksh (the original one, not pdksh) is brilliant in avoiding forks. If you have shell scripts that use lots of command substitutions (e.g. foo=$(printf ...), pdksh can be several orders of magnitude faster than any other shell I know of.
- subshell differences between /bin/sh and /bin/ksh Johnny C. Lam
- Re: subshell differences between /bin/sh and /bin/ksh Edgar Fuß
- Re: subshell differences between /bin/sh and /bin/ksh Robert Elz