Lazy IO and asynchronous callbacks?

[Simon Marlow]

On 08/07/2010 23:25, J. Garrett Morris wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I'm currently in the process of wrapping a C API, and I've run across
> an interesting possibility.  Basically, the C API exposes non-blocking
> versions of some potentially long-running operations, and will invoke
> a callback to indicate that the long running operation has finished.
> For instance, I have something like:
>
> int longRunningReadOperation(int length, byte * buf, void (*callback)())
>
> When callback is called, then there are length bytes in buf.  What I'd
> like to do is wrap this in Haskell function like:
>
> longRunningReadOperation :: Int ->  IO [Byte]
>
> such that the function returns immediately, and only blocks when
> someone pulls on the results if the callback hasn't been triggered
> yet.  I figure I'm going to need unsafeInterleaveIO, but I'm not sure
> what to do in the computation I pass to it.  I had a small hope that
> if the callback put the results into an MVar (say var), and I returned
> (unsafeInterleaveIO (readMVar var)) that might work, but it seems like
> if the readMVar blocks then the callback doesn't execute either.

I don't see why that wouldn't work.  You are compiling with -threaded, 
right?

Cheers,
	Simon