BUT: This can make some people unhappy. Isn't there a more deterministic way to schedule finalizers?
I wrote the Hugs version which does try to be more deterministic so I'm probably not the best qualified to write about what's wrong with GHC :-) But, I think part of the problem is that GHC gives the 'main' thread special status: the whole program quits when the main thread quits even if there are other threads that are runnable. There'd be less of a problem if the whole program quit only when there were no runnable threads _and_ garbage collection did not create any runnable threads. I think there's a reason why GHC gives the main thread special status though. They certainly went to some effort to give it special status so I guess there must be a good reason that they did so? -- Alastair Reid