fork and ghc

[John Meacham]

On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 10:15:45AM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
> We provide System.Posix.forkProcess, which is a "controlled" version of 
> fork. It probably works ok in the single-threaded runtime, but I'd say it's 
> probably slightly dubious in the threaded runtime especially if you're 
> planning on using it for more than just fork/exec.
> 
> POSIX puts some tight restrictions on what you can do in the child of a 
> fork in a multi-threaded process (only async-signal-safe operations may be 
> used).

Hmm.. sounds fairly complicated. I think I will forgo that and just have
jhc exec multiple copies of itself, it is somewhat more inefficient, as
it has to reload the data from files, but it allows the possibility of
it execing jhc on many different machines, which could be nice.


on another topic, I ran across this old paper online which gives an
exceedingly clever method of implementing a functional language compiler
doing real garbage collection and efficient tail calls in portable C
 http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/CheneyMTA.html
It is very interesting, I think I might implement it as my 'fast to
compile' back end for jhc if I can adapt it to a lazy language.


        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈