Does `parent` provide any advantage over running `exec`?

[silviot]

I recently learned about Caddy and I'm evaluating it.

I noticed it uses this parent utility in places where I would expect exec to be used.

The documentation does not mention what advantage parent has over exec. A disadvantage is certainly increased complexity and one extra process running, but I fail to see the pros here. IMHO documenting them in the README would be great.