[Haskell-cafe] What does unpacking an MVar really mean?

[Leon Smith]

Let me clarify a bit.

I am familiar with the source of Control.Concurrent.MVar,  and I do see {-#
UNPACK #-}'ed MVars around,  for example in GHC's IO manager.     What I
should have asked is,  what does an MVar# look like?  This cannot be
inferred from Haskell source;  though I suppose I could have tried to read
the Runtime source.

Now,  one would hope that and (MVar# RealWorld footype) would
 approximately correspond to a "footype * mvar;" variable in C.   The
problem is this cannot _always_ be the case,  because you can alias the
(MVar# RealWorld footype) by placing a single MVar into two unpacked
columns in two different data structures.    So you would need to be able
to still sometimes represent an MVar# by a footype ** mvar at runtime,
 even though one would hope that it would be represented by a "footype *
mvar" in one particular data structure.

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 1:04 AM, Ryan Ingram <ryani.spam at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Because of this, boxed MVars can be garbage collected without necessarily
> garbage-collecting the MVar# it holds, if a live reference to that MVar#
> still exists elsewhere.
>

I was asking the dual question:  if the MVar# exists in some data
structure,  can that data structure still be garbage collected when there
is a reference to the MVar#,  but not the data structure it is contained
within.

Best,
Leon
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