Shake fails test with GHC 7.10 RC3

[Neil Mitchell]

Herbert, thanks for the list of patches, nothing obvious there - my
best guess is it's something incredibly sensitive and it only needs
the tiniest change anywhere to make it happen. Things like moving
NOINLINE monomorphic-type definitions from one module to another are
causing the bug to appear/disappear, which isn't what I'd expect.

Simon, changing from error to error in IO causes the bug to disappear,
but then so do most things. The error return type is type IO (), so I
suspect that forces it to be raised at the right place - but it's
certainly one of the possibilities for what is going wrong. Diffing
the Core is a great idea.

I'll keep reducing and see what I get to. Given the sensitivity of the
bug, I'm sure a NOINLINE on an out-of-the-way function will make it go
away, so I can easily fix Shake itself - so I'm more tracking it down
from the point of GHC now.

Thanks, Neil


On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 5:04 PM, Simon Peyton Jones
<simonpj at microsoft.com> wrote:
> I'm really sorry but I can't think of anything.  Sounds horrible.
>
> If you throw exceptions using 'error' (not in IO), then you are of course vulnerable to strictness changes.  If the thing isn't actually evaluated inside the catch block, you won't see the exception.  But I'm sure you've thought of that.
>
> I'd experiment with one of the smaller changes you describe, such as adding a putStrLn, and comparing Core, before and after.  Switching off -O will make a huge difference, so hard to compare.  Turning off the state hack will have a more global effect.  But the other changes sound more pin-point and hence the differences will be smaller.
>
> Simon
>
> |  -----Original Message-----
> |  From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Neil
> |  Mitchell
> |  Sent: 18 March 2015 15:33
> |  To: ghc-devs at haskell.org
> |  Subject: Shake fails test with GHC 7.10 RC3
> |
> |  Hi,
> |
> |  Testing GHC 7.10 RC3 I've found a bug where Shake seems to catch the
> |  wrong exception in the wrong place. It's only hit by one of my tests,
> |  and I've managed to isolate it to a fragment of code with no
> |  unsafePerformIO, that throws exceptions using error (so not in IO), and
> |  operates in IO. Turning off the stack hack makes the bug go away, but
> |  then so does -O0, marking one of the functions it calls NOINLINE, or
> |  moving an INLINE function it calls to a different module, or adding a
> |  putStrLn under a catch block - it's very sensitive to the exact
> |  conditions. This test and this exact code worked fine with GHC 7.10
> |  RC2.
> |
> |  I was wondering if there have been any state hack related changes or
> |  other potentially dangerous optimisation changes since RC2? I'll
> |  continue to try reducing the bug, but it's somewhat difficult as the
> |  larger system is quite big, and the code is very sensitive.
> |
> |  Thanks, Neil
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