Quote Originally Posted by sanjac View Post
Is there no Qt-ish (elegant, cross-platform) way then to spawn a process which the spawning process can watch (monitor status, respawn if crashed) and communicate with (using stdio preferably), but which stays alive even after the spawning process crashes? That would be the ideal behavior for my app...
You can use QProcess::startDetached() to launch the process and communicate with it with a named pipe. You can probably exclude the process from the process group once it's launched using native API.

(Btw: is there an official place to let the the Qt team know that the documentation could really use some improvement regarding all of this?)
Qt has nothing to do with this. This is all OS policy that drives this behaviour. I think this is called "process group", at least in Unix world.