Using GHC with SMP and FFI?

[Simon Marlow]

Li, Peng wrote:
> [1] Extending the Haskell Foreign Function Interface with Concurrency
> [2] Haskell on a Shared-Memory Multiprocessor
> 
> I read the above two papers [1,2] and I have been trying to write an
> application that uses both FFI and SMP. The first paper [1] shows how
> FFI is implemented on uniprocessor concurrent Haskell; the second
> paper [2] shows how SMP Concurrent Haskell is implemented.  However, I
> found little documentation on using FFI with the latest SMP extension.
>  In addition to [1],  what has been changed and what should a
> programmer know if he wants to use FFI in a multithreaded program
> running on SMP machines?

Nothing has changed relative to [1], the semantics is exactly the same. 
   (and in case this wasn't clear, GHC's -threaded option implements the 
semantics in [1]).

You should know that your "safe" FFI calls may be executed concurrently 
by separate OS threads, so calls you make in this way should be to 
thread-safe libraries.

I'm looking into the bug you submitted, #713.  It appears to be a bug in 
the runtime somewhere, but it's a difficult one to track down. 
Hopefully I'll have a fix soon.

Cheers,
	Simon