BlockedIndefinitelyOnMVar exception

Neil Mitchell ndmitchell at gmail.com
Mon Jul 5 15:43:58 EDT 2010


>> I wrote my Chan around the abstraction:
>>
>> data Chan a = Chan (MVar (Either [a] [MVar a]))
>>
>> The Chan either has elements in it (Left), or has readers waiting for
>> elements (Right). To get the fairness properties on Chan you might
>> want to make these two lists Queue's, but I think the basic principle
>> still works. By using this abstraction my Chan was a lot simpler. With
>> this scheme implementing isEmpyChan or unGetChan would both work
>> nicely. My Chan was not designed for performance. (In truth I replaced
>> the Left with IntMap a, and inserted elements with a randomly chosen
>> key, but the basic idea is the same.)
>
> I like the idea.  But what happens if one of the blocked threads gets killed
> by a killThread (e.g. a timeout) while it is waiting?  Won't we still give
> it an element of the Chan sometime in the future?  Perhaps this doesn't
> happen in your scenario, but it seems to throw a spanner in the works for
> using this as a general-purpose implementation.

I hadn't thought of that at all - my scenario doesn't have any threads
being killed. With the thought of threads dying concurrency
abstractions become significantly harder - I hadn't quite realised how
hard that must make it.

Thanks, Neil


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