SIGALRM, SIGVTALRM, and third party libraries

[Edward Z. Yang]

Excerpts from Bryan O'Sullivan's message of Fri Sep 03 17:00:03 -0400 2010:
> What I am wondering is if there's a practical downside to doing this. Am I
> going to accidentally kill something? This is a very important gap in the
> usability of GHC with native libraries, and if this approach actually turns
> out to be safe in practice, that would be wonderful.

I think the primary downside is that it's not portable (yet) to Windows.  Simon
Marlow and I have been working on "interruptible FFI calls", and one of the
things that needs to be addressed along the way is that the RTS should publish
"portable" equivalents of the pthread functions which are blessed for foreign
libraries to use for this purpose.  Maybe we should emulate threading functionality
at the pthreads layer?

Cheers,
Edward

P.S. I assume that the mysql C bindings are poorly written so as not to work
with alarm signals?