Brian B wrote:
Hi Bulat,
My contribution to the survey: I've used forkProcess to daemonize a ghc program inside the haskell fuse bindings: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/HFuse http://code.haskell.org/hfuse/System/Fuse.hsc
If removing the non-threaded RTS would break forkProcess entirely, these bindings would have to do something different. The issue: users of the FUSE C api will get daemonized using daemon(2); it'd be nice if GHC fuse programs could behave similarly.
I also use forkProcess extensively: in HSH, for instance, which is used by hpodder, twidge, and a host of other tools. Removing the ability to use forkProcess removes the ability to write a Unix shell in Haskell, or to do anything shell-like, or anything even mildly advanced involving piping, file descriptors, and the like. I would see it as a significant regression. The System.Process calls, last I checked (in 6.8.x) were both too buggy to use for complex tasks, and too inadequate for some (though the adequacy has been improving.) -- John