ghci and ghc -threaded broken with pipes & forking

[John Goerzen]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 01:06:25PM -0800, Jeremy Shaw wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Your first problem is just a line buffering issue. You need to
> explicitly set the line buffer inside the child processes:
> 
>                               redir fstdin stdInput
>                               hSetBuffering stdin LineBuffering
>                               redir fstdout stdOutput
>                               hSetBuffering stdout LineBuffering

Hi Jeremy,

First, many thanks for looking into this.

That doesn't make sense to me, since these aren't used for anything in
Haskell prior to the call to executeFile.  The Haskell buffers should
just disappear, since the Haskell process disappears, right?

> Once you fix that you will encounter some new race condition type
> bugs. These bugs will show up, even *without* the -threaded flag.

Hrm, could you point out a couple?  I'm developing as many unit tests as
I can, and haven't had any problem running them under a non-threaded
GHC.

I am aware that the debug statements can write over each other at some
cases, or even get inserted into the pipeline in a few situations, but
these are only used in exceptional cases and will generally be removed
from the code before too long.

Other than that, I think I've got it OK.  My unit tests are covering
singleton commands and 2-4 commands in a pipe, including various
permutations of calls to external programs and Haskell functions.