[GHC] #5219: need a version of hs_init that returns an error code for command-line errors

[GHC]

#5219: need a version of hs_init that returns an error code for command-line
errors
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    Reporter:  simonmar          |        Owner:              
        Type:  feature request   |       Status:  new         
    Priority:  normal            |    Milestone:  7.4.1       
   Component:  Runtime System    |      Version:  7.0.3       
    Keywords:                    |     Testcase:              
   Blockedby:                    |   Difficulty:              
          Os:  Unknown/Multiple  |     Blocking:              
Architecture:  Unknown/Multiple  |      Failure:  None/Unknown
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 This ticket is extracted from Roman's comment in #4464:

 `hs_init` simply aborts if it doesn't like the RTS arguments which is
 quite unhelpful for dynamic libraries. I took me a day to find out that an
 application crash was caused by a failing hs_init (because of the -rtsopts
 problem). I would like to add a check for this to our code but there
 doesn't seem to be a way to do this. It would be much nicer if hs_init
 returned a failure/success code, at least for dynamic libraries.

 To which I responded:

 If hs_init needs to return an error condition rather than aborting, then
 we need to define a new API for that, and fix setupRtsFlags. I don't think
 we need to do this for every case of stg_exit and certainly not for barf:
 these are all internal error conditions and we have no sensible way to
 recover.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5219>
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