Concurrent Haskell, asynchronous exceptions and interruptibility (again)

Patrick Bosworth patrick_bosworth@hotmail.com
Wed, 30 Oct 2002 08:41:09 +0000


For Concurrent Haskell, with respect to asynchronous exceptions, can a 
thread receive an asynchronous exception if it's evaluating an expression 
that could "potentially block on IO" when evaluated within the "block" 
function?

Specifically, is interruptibility determined statically in the language 
definition or dynamically at run time?

For example, assume a thread is evaluating the following function.

transfer :: MVar a -> IO (MVar a)
transfer from =
    block $ do
        to <- newEmptyMVar
        x <- takeMVar from
        putMVar to x
        return to

In general, since putMVar is an IO function, it can potentially block (if 
its MVar argument is already occupied with a value). However, since "MVar 
to" will obviously be vacant in this instance, the putMVar can not block on 
IO.

Would ghc allow an asynchronous exception to be raised at the point that 
"putMVar to x" is evaluated?

If not, then I guess transfer is exception safe.

Would that answer scale? Could I replace the "putMVar to x" with an 
arbitrarily large/complex IO function that I might write that is guaranteed 
(by me at least) to be non-blocking and still be sure that an exception 
would not be delivered during evaluation of that function?

Cheers,

Patrick.

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