[Haskell-cafe] readEitherChan

[Thomas Hallgren]

Simon Marlow wrote:

>It's a hard problem.  Trying to code up takeEitherMVar by hand always
>seems to lead to solutions with race conditions - I can't see a way to
>do it.
>  
>
The following solution should be free from race conditions,

    takeEitherMVar :: MVar a -> MVar b -> IO (Either a b)
    takeEitherMVar mva mvb =
      do ma <- tryTakeMVar mva
         case ma of
           Just a -> return (Left a)
           Nothing -> do mb <- tryTakeMVar mvb
		         case mb of
		           Just b -> return (Right b)
		           Nothing -> takeEitherMVar mva mvb

but it has an efficiency problem, though...

>Perhaps takeEitherMVar should be provided as a primitive, but I'm
>concerned that the same problems will crop up if we tried to implement
>takeEitherMVar in a multi-threaded runtime
>
Also, what if you wanted to choose between three variables?

>So I think in order to do this you have to build another abstraction
>around MVars.  I've attached some code I just hacked up to do just that;
>it's untested (but compiles), and has a couple of known deficiencies,
>but it might be along the right lines.
>  
>
Thanks, I'll see if I can understand that...

-- 
Thomas H

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