[Haskell-cafe] Re: Asynchronous exception wormholes kill modularity

Steve Schafer steve at fenestra.com
Thu Mar 25 14:12:43 EDT 2010


On Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:16:07 +0100, you wrote:

>Yes counting the nesting level like Twan proposed will definitely
>solve the modularity problem.
>
>I do think we need to optimize the block and unblock operations in
>such a way that they don't need to use IORefs to save the counting
>level. The version Twan posted requires 2 reads and 2 writes for a
>block and unblock. While I haven't profiled it I think it's not very
>efficient.

Wouldn't you be better off using "real" transaction processing (i.e.,
with rollback)? That preserves the greatest possible modularity, because
the lower level operations don't have to worry about failures at all.
You generally only care about atomicity at some outer, "observable"
level; there is rarely any point in worrying about "nested atomicity."

Steve Schafer


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