[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hugs vs GHC (again)was: Re: Somerandomnewbiequestions

Aaron Denney wnoise at ofb.net
Tue Jan 11 19:21:25 EST 2005


On 2005-01-11, Simon Marlow <simonmar at microsoft.com> wrote:
> On 11 January 2005 14:15, Gracjan Polak wrote:
>
>> Simon Marlow wrote:
>>  > There's a big lock on File.  If you want to do truly concurrent
>>  reading, > you can make multiple FileInputStreams, each of which has
>>  its own file > descriptor (the Unix implementation uses dup(2)).
>>  >
>> 
>> Original and descriptor returned by dup or dup2 share file pointer.
>
> *blink*
>
> You're right!  Serves me right for assuming that POSIX would have
> sensible semantics.  Perhaps this API isn't implementable, in its
> current state.

Others have pointed out pread() and pwrite();  Perhaps we can stick
this function in an extension package.  (Though it is required for 
Unix 98 conformance, so anything reasonable will have it.  Hmm.
Does open("/dev/fd/n") or ("/proc/self/fd/n") act as dup() or a fresh
open() to underlying file?)

I actually don't see the problem with interacting with other processes
that we've forked.  Other processes using our image and runtime can
arrange to use something sharable for locking.  Other processes not
doing this can change the bytes in the file, so that we're not guaranteed
that we get what we expect anyway, unless we have full control over that
process.  In which case we can have it do whatever we want.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-



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