The following spins, burning about 250% cpu time, for large lists; it works fine for smaller lists. This is for a recent version of guile from git: guile -v guile (GNU Guile) 2.1.5.19-7e9395 will retry with newer guile shortly. On fresh guile: (use-modules (srfi srfi-1)) (define al (list-tabulate 100000 values)) (define foo 0) (par-for-each (lambda (x) (set! foo (+ x foo))) al) ^CERROR: In procedure scm-error: ERROR: User interrupt Entering a new prompt. Type `,bt' for a backtrace or `,q' to continue. scheme@(guile-user) [1]> ,bt In ice-9/threads.scm: 289:22 5 (loop _) In ice-9/futures.scm: 265:11 4 (touch #) 243:14 3 (work) In unknown file: 2 (wait-condition-variable #t) While executing meta-command: ERROR: In procedure cdr: Wrong type argument in position 1 (expecting pair): () scheme@(guile-user) [1]> The above is after interrupting after an hour or so of accumulated CPU time. Again, shorter lists (e.g. 10K long) work fine. My production lists are about 400K to 2M in size. --linas