[Haskell-cafe] readEitherChan

[S. Alexander Jacobson]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, Simon Marlow wrote:
> There's no fundamental difficulty that I'm aware of.  The lack of these
> functions is probably down to historical reasons: tryTakeMVar and
> tryPutMVar are recent additions to the old MVar interface.

Ok.  Then will take a look in the library and try
to understand the concrete implementations.

> It seems to me that with MVars you can implement pretty much any
> abstraction you need, including choice, and it's not clear that there
> would be any advantage to providing any more primitives.  That's based
> on my experience so far, anyway - I know there are people out there that
> have made rather more heavy use of MVars than I have (eg. George
> Russell).

Well we appear to be having a problem implementing
a takeEitherMVar or readEitherChan without adding
a new abstraction....

> > Also, you wouldn't need these functions if
> > Haskell's concurency model was defined to be
> > non-preemptive.  How come forkIO was not
> > specifically defined to be non-preemptive (with
> > forkOS dependent on the local OS native threading
> > model)?
>
> So threads forked by forkIO would be non-preemptive with respect to
> what?  Other threads forked by forkIO, or forkOS?

All forkIO'ed threads would run in the same
OS thread and only lose control when they
block.  I now realize that this model is
incompatible with distributing execution onto
multiple CPUs so I am wrong here?

Though, in practice, does GHC actually does take
advantage of multiple CPUs when they are
available?  Or do need GPH?

> forkOS is a very recent addition, BTW.  Its primary purpose is to make a
> "bound" thread, to give the programmer a handle on which OS thread is
> used to make foreign calls.  See this paper we submitted to the Haskell
> Workshop this year:
>
> http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/papers/conc-ffi.ps.gz
> Hope that sheds some light.

Ah.  Very interesting.  Thank you.

-Alex-

_________________________________________________________________
S. Alexander Jacobson                  mailto:me at alexjacobson.com
tel:917-770-6565                       http://alexjacobson.com