[Haskell-cafe] forkIO on GHCI does not seem to spawn the thread in the background on some OSs

[Brandon Moore]

> From: David Leimbach, Sent: Tue, February 8, 2011 8:07:39 AM
> On Monday, February 7, 2011, C K Kashyap <ckkashyap at gmail.com> wrote:
> >  Hi,I found that on windows and my ubuntu box, when I did this
> > ghci> t  <- forkIO someAction
> > "someAction" started executing in the foreground  - as in, the ghci prompt 
>did not come back (until I pressed  Ctrl-C)
> >
> > On my mac however, when I ran the same thing, the action  started executing 
>in the background and ghci> prompt returned  instantaneously.How can I get the 
>thread backgrounded explicitly?

I can't reproduce this. What are you using as the action?

I've tried bottoms, and tight loops whose Core contains no allocations, and not 
managed to lock up the prompt, or seen ghci using more threads than I have 
cores.

One thing that may give the appearance of locking up the prompt is if
the thread starts reading from the terminal and your commands no longer make it 
to the interpreter.

> It is  not always a thread.  ForkIO creates a spark and then the
> scheduler  decides when sparks should be scheduled to threads.  Thus
> you get a  guarantee of concurrent but not parallel execution.

That is not correct - it is "par" that creates sparks may be discarded.

forkIO always creates new threads, though it is of course up to the scheduler  
when the threads are executed, and how many cores are used.

> Are you running with  threads enabled?

That is, was your ghci compiled with -threaded? This mostly
depends on the version. what version of ghc are you running, and how did you 
install it?