Is Safe Haskell intended to allow segfaults?

[Ryan Newton]

Hi Edward,

On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 11:58 PM, Edward Kmett <ekmett at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 1.) If you remove IO from being able to be compiled inside Safe code _at
> all_ most packages I have that bother to expose Safe information will have
> to stop bothering.
>

I definitely wouldn't argue for removing it entirely.  But it's good to
know that there are instances where IO functions get mixed up in safe
modules.  I'll try to systematically find all of these on hackage, but in
the meantime do you have a sample list of modules?

My modest starting proposal is marking certain Foreign.* modules as Unsafe
rather than Trustworthy.  We'll find all the modules affected.  But, again,
are there any modules you know of offhand that are affected?  They should
fall into two categories:

   1. Safe modules that must become Trustworthy (if they import Foreign
   bits, but don't expose the ability to corrupt memory to the clients of
   their APIs).
   2. Safe modules that must become Unsafe or be split further into smaller
   modules.

Obviously (2) is the biggest source of potential disruption.

I wouldn't ask anyone to accept a patch on GHC until we'd explored these
impacts pretty thoroughly.

I'd have to cut up too many APIs into too many fine-grained pieces.
>

Yeah, the module-level business is pretty annoying.  "vector' removed
".Safe" modules and no one has gotten around to adding the ".Unsafe".


> 2.) Assuming instead that you're talking about a stronger-than-Safe
> additional language extension, say ReallySafe or SafeIO, it all comes down
> to what the user is allowed to do in IO, doesn't it? What effects are users
> granted access to? We don't have a very fine-grained system for IO-effect
> management, and it seems pretty much any choice you pick for what to put in
> the sandbox will be wrong for some users, so you'd need some sort of pragma
> for each IO operation saying what bins it falls into and to track that
> while type checking, etc.
>

Well, *maybe* it is a slippery slope that leads to a full effect system.
But I'd like to see these issues enumerated.  Does memory safety as a goal
really involve so many different effects?  Do you think there will be 1, 3,
10, or 100 things beyond Foreign.Ptr to worry about?

3.) On the other hand, someone could _build_ an effect system in Haskell
> that happens to sit on top of IO, holding effects in an HList, undischarged
> nullary class constraint, etc.
>

Well, sure, I hope we will continue to aim for this as well.  This is
effectively what we do with our "LVish" Par monad, where we use Safe
Haskell to ensure users cannot break the effect system in -XSafe code.

Best,
 -Ryan
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