Safepoint does not work as documented in paper

[Chris Kuklewicz]

Simon Marlow wrote:
> Chris Kuklewicz wrote:
>> One odd problem:  The paper on async exception defines:
>>
>> safePoint = unblock (return ())
>>
>> but this simply does not work in my testing.  Ever.  Even using
>> {-# NOINLINE safePoint #-} or "-Onot"
>>
>> By comparision, this does work: safepoint = unblock (print "safe")
>>
>> So how can such a safePoint be written?
> 
> The window in 'unblock (return ())' is tiny, I'm not really surprised if nothing ever gets through it.  You might have more luck with 'unblock yield'.
> 
> (BTW, I think glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org is a more appropriate list, so I'm replying there instead).
> 
> Cheers,
>         Simon

That works, thanks.

It is funny, the killThread thread is halted and waiting for the async signal to
be delivered, and the running thread got through eleven (unblock (print
"sleeper")) statements before noticing that it had been told to die.   Using
your (unblock yield) worked

I had thought that "unblock" would always check the queue of incoming async
signals but this is obviously not the case.  The "Asynchronous Exceptions in
Haskell" paper says:

"As soon as a thread exits the scope of a block, and at regular intervals during
execution inside unblock, its pending exceptions queue must be checked. If there
are pending exceptions, the first one is removed from the queue and delivered to
the thread."

...which is why I have the wrong expectation.  Is there a better resource for
how GHC actually implements block/unblock/throwTo ?  Searching for throwTo on
the wiki gets me nothing.

-- 
Chris