5 Mar
2007
5 Mar
'07
9:36 a.m.
On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 12:59:17PM +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
There seems to be a common misconception that forkOS is necessary to get certain kinds of concurrency, and forkIO won't do. I don't know where this comes from: the documentation does seem to be quite clear to me. The only reason to use forkOS is for interacting with foreign code that uses thread-local state; everytyhing else can be done with forkIO (and it is usually better to use forkIO).
From reading the docs, it sounds like forkIO keeps everything in a single OS thread/process. Doesn't this mean that a program that uses forkIO instead of forkOS loses out on SMP machines?