Concurrent Haskell (GHC) and Win32 Applications ?

[Antony Blakey]

Hi,
    I'm experimenting with GHC as a platform for writing a Win32 GUI 
application, and I've hit what I think is a brick wall.

The problem I think is with the lightweight thread implementation - 
Win32 calls can (and will) block the OS thread that makes the call, 
which blocks the entire system. Given that I'm wanting to write a 
network server with a Win32 GUI, this is obviously a Bad Thing.

So, does any know if I missing some vital piece of information? I am 
using the following reduced test case, which I don't think is clueless.

import Win32
import Concurrent

endless:: Char -> IO ()
endless c = do { putChar c; endless c }

main = do { task1; task2; endless 'b' }
     where
       task1 = forkIO ( do { messageBox nullHANDLE "Hey" "Yeah" mB_OK;
                             return () } )
       task2 = forkIO ( endless 'a' )

It does intersperse the 'a' and 'b' output nicely, but stops while the 
message box is on the screen.

I'm not keen on writing a seperate GUI management thread in C++ and 
linking - the point is to do all of this in Haskell and write an 
application indistinguishable from a C++ GUI app e.g. imagine Simon 
Peyton Jones' sample webserver with a realtime GUI monitor.

Thanks in advance for any pointers!