Sparks off a new thread to run the IO computation passed as the first argument, and returns the ThreadId of the newly created thread.

The new thread will be a lightweight thread; if you want to use a foreign library that uses thread-local storage, use Control.Concurrent.forkOS instead.

GHC note: the new thread inherits the blocked state of the parent (see Control.Exception.block).

The newly created thread has an exception handler that discards the exceptions BlockedOnDeadMVar, BlockedIndefinitely, and ThreadKilled, and passes all other exceptions to the uncaught exception handler (see setUncaughtExceptionHandler).

Like forkIO, but lets you specify on which CPU the thread is created. Unlike a forkIO thread, a thread created by forkOnIO will stay on the same CPU for its entire lifetime (forkIO threads can migrate between CPUs according to the scheduling policy). forkOnIO is useful for overriding the scheduling policy when you know in advance how best to distribute the threads.

The Int argument specifies the CPU number; it is interpreted modulo numCapabilities (note that it actually specifies a capability number rather than a CPU number, but to a first approximation the two are equivalent).

killThread terminates the given thread (GHC only). Any work already done by the thread isn't lost: the computation is suspended until required by another thread. The memory used by the thread will be garbage collected if it isn't referenced from anywhere. The killThread function is defined in terms of throwTo:

 killThread tid = throwTo tid ThreadKilled

Killthread is a no-op if the target thread has already completed.

throwTo raises an arbitrary exception in the target thread (GHC only).

throwTo does not return until the exception has been raised in the target thread. The calling thread can thus be certain that the target thread has received the exception. This is a useful property to know when dealing with race conditions: eg. if there are two threads that can kill each other, it is guaranteed that only one of the threads will get to kill the other.

If the target thread is currently making a foreign call, then the exception will not be raised (and hence throwTo will not return) until the call has completed. This is the case regardless of whether the call is inside a block or not.

Important note: the behaviour of throwTo differs from that described in the paper "Asynchronous exceptions in Haskell" (http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/Papers/asynch-exns.htm). In the paper, throwTo is non-blocking; but the library implementation adopts a more synchronous design in which throwTo does not return until the exception is received by the target thread. The trade-off is discussed in Section 9 of the paper. Like any blocking operation, throwTo is therefore interruptible (see Section 5.3 of the paper).

There is currently no guarantee that the exception delivered by throwTo will be delivered at the first possible opportunity. In particular, a thread may unblock and then re-block exceptions (using unblock and block) without receiving a pending throwTo. This is arguably undesirable behaviour.

labelThread stores a string as identifier for this thread if you built a RTS with debugging support. This identifier will be used in the debugging output to make distinction of different threads easier (otherwise you only have the thread state object's address in the heap).

Other applications like the graphical Concurrent Haskell Debugger (http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~fhu/chd/) may choose to overload labelThread for their purposes as well.

Suspends the current thread for a given number of microseconds (GHC only).

There is no guarantee that the thread will be rescheduled promptly when the delay has expired, but the thread will never continue to run earlier than specified.

Return the contents of the MVar. If the MVar is currently empty, takeMVar will wait until it is full. After a takeMVar, the MVar is left empty.

There are two further important properties of takeMVar:

• takeMVar is single-wakeup. That is, if there are multiple threads blocked in takeMVar, and the MVar becomes full, only one thread will be woken up. The runtime guarantees that the woken thread completes its takeMVar operation.
• When multiple threads are blocked on an MVar, they are woken up in FIFO order. This is useful for providing fairness properties of abstractions built using MVars.

Put a value into an MVar. If the MVar is currently full, putMVar will wait until it becomes empty.

There are two further important properties of putMVar:

• putMVar is single-wakeup. That is, if there are multiple threads blocked in putMVar, and the MVar becomes empty, only one thread will be woken up. The runtime guarantees that the woken thread completes its putMVar operation.
• When multiple threads are blocked on an MVar, they are woken up in FIFO order. This is useful for providing fairness properties of abstractions built using MVars.

Check whether a given MVar is empty.

Notice that the boolean value returned is just a snapshot of the state of the MVar. By the time you get to react on its result, the MVar may have been filled (or emptied) - so be extremely careful when using this operation. Use tryTakeMVar instead if possible.

Perform a series of STM actions atomically.

You cannot use atomically inside an unsafePerformIO or unsafeInterleaveIO. Any attempt to do so will result in a runtime error. (Reason: allowing this would effectively allow a transaction inside a transaction, depending on exactly when the thunk is evaluated.)

However, see newTVarIO, which can be called inside unsafePerformIO, and which allows top-level TVars to be allocated.

Unsafely performs IO in the STM monad. Beware: this is a highly dangerous thing to do.

• The STM implementation will often run transactions multiple times, so you need to be prepared for this if your IO has any side effects.
• The STM implementation will abort transactions that are known to be invalid and need to be restarted. This may happen in the middle of unsafeIOToSTM, so make sure you don't acquire any resources that need releasing (exception handlers are ignored when aborting the transaction). That includes doing any IO using Handles, for example. Getting this wrong will probably lead to random deadlocks.
• The transaction may have seen an inconsistent view of memory when the IO runs. Invariants that you expect to be true throughout your program may not be true inside a transaction, due to the way transactions are implemented. Normally this wouldn't be visible to the programmer, but using unsafeIOToSTM can expose it.