Dear Cafe, I am surprised by the behaviour of the program below (the interesting property is whether it will output "foo"). Behaviours (plural) actually: it seems to depend on optimisation level, on omit-yields, and on very small changes in the source code: It does print (mostly), when compiled with -O0. It does not, when compiled with -O2. With -O2 -fno-omit-yields, it will print. With -O0 -fno-omit-yields, and when I remove the two newTVar in the beginning, it will mostly not print. How come? These differences already occur with the last two lines replaced by "forever $ return ()", so the STM stuff may be inessential here. But that's the context where I came across the problem. - J.W. import Control.Concurrent.STM import Control.Concurrent ( forkIO ) import Control.Monad ( forever ) import System.IO main = do atomically $ newTVar "bar" atomically $ newTVar False forkIO $ putStrLn "foo" x <- atomically $ newTVar False forever $ atomically $ writeTVar x True