On Oct 17, 2007, at 6:11 PM, Stefan O'Rear wrote:
Just to be precise about it, though, there's nothing about Haskell per se that causes trouble with fork, right? This is a GHC implementation issue.
Forking in the presense of multiple threads is a semantic nightmare. Anything any Haskell implementation does is going to be wrong in at least two ways, so it's probably best not to try. Write your fork- child code in C.
Forking in the presence of multiple threads is not my problem - I don't want multiple threads. Any Haskell implementation will do fine as long as, like C, it doesn't use threads to solve internal runtime problems. I know that for some, the UNIX process machinery - fork, the file descriptors, execve, etc. - is an appalling and gruesome spectacle that surely ought to have faded away in the lovely new order of things, but it's really a fairly elegant system in its antique way, and UNIX (et al.) is built around it on a big scale. It isn't going away. Donn Cave, donn@drizzle.com