Weird behavior of the NonTermination exception

Bas van Dijk v.dijk.bas at gmail.com
Thu May 3 17:10:38 CEST 2012


Hello,

Before I turn the following into a ticket I want to ask if I miss
something obvious:

When I run the following program:

-------------------------------------------------
import Prelude hiding (catch)
import Control.Exception
import Control.Concurrent

main :: IO ()
main = do
  mv <- newEmptyMVar
  _ <- forkIO $ do
         catch action
               (\e -> putStrLn $ "I solved the Halting Problem: " ++
                                 show (e :: SomeException))
         putStrLn "putting MVar..."
         putMVar mv ()
         putStrLn "putted MVar"
  takeMVar mv

action :: IO ()
action = let x = x in x
-------------------------------------------------

I get the output:

$ ghc --make Loop.hs -o loop -O2 -fforce-recomp && ./loop
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( Loop.hs, Loop.o )
Linking loop ...
loop: thread blocked indefinitely in an MVar operation
I solved the Halting Problem: <<loop>>
putting MVar...
putted MVar

As can be seen, the putMVar is executed successfully. So why do I get
the message: "thread blocked indefinitely in an MVar operation"?

Note that if I change the action to a normal error the message disappears.

I discovered this bug when hunting for another one. I have a Haskell
web-server where one of the request handlers contained a loop. All
exceptions thrown by handlers are caught and logged. When executing
the looping handler I noticed ~0% CPU usage so I assumed that the
handler wasn't actually looping because a NonTermination exception was
thrown. However for some reason the NonTermination exception was not
caught and logged. I haven't yet isolated this bug into a small
test-case but when trying that I discovered the above.

Regards,

Bas



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