[Haskell-cafe] Questions about concurrency and laziness

[Tony Garcia]

Hi,

First of all, apologies if this is not the right place to ask this question.

I'm reading the book "Parallel and concurrent programming in Haskell" and
I'm having some issues reasoning about the impact of laziness.

Looking at the first example in chapter 8 [1]

main = do
  m1 <- newEmptyMVar
  m2 <- newEmptyMVar

  forkIO $ do
    r <- getURL "http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shovel"
    putMVar m1 r

  forkIO $ do
    r <- getURL "http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spade"
    putMVar m2 r

  r1 <- takeMVar m1
  r2 <- takeMVar m2
  print (B.length r1, B.length r2)

I don't understand why this function is not just putting an unevaluated
thunk in the MVar. Well, I assume that getURL is an eager function, but
looking at its code [2] or at the documentation of Network.Browser [3] I
don't see why...

Am I looking at this wrong? Is there any rule of thumb to be used in these
cases? I have the impression that it's really easy to end up creating
thunks in parallel threads and evaluating them in the main one...

Thanks,
Jose.

[1] http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000929/ch08.html
[2] https://github.com/simonmar/parconc-examples/blob/master/GetURL.hs
[3]
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/HTTP-4000.0.8/docs/Network-Browser.html
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