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

[Simon Marlow]

On 19 January 2005 13:50, William Lee Irwin III wrote:

> On 19 January 2005 09:45, Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
>>> Okay, my ignorance of Posix is showing again. Is it currently the
>>> case, then, that every GHC thread will stop running while a disk
>>> read is in progress in any thread? Is this true on all platforms?
> 
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 01:39:05PM -0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
>> It's true on Unix-like systems, I believe.  Even with -threaded.  It
>> might not be true on Win32.
> 
> How does forkOS fit into this picture? It's described in the
> documentation as allowing concurrent execution of system calls
> and other activity by other threads.

forkOS doesn't fix this.  It forks another OS thread which can be used
to make concurrent foreign calls, if they are not marked "unsafe".
However, the standard I/O library, in -threaded mode, does read like
this:

        - non-blocking, "unsafe", read() to see what's there
        - if read() would block, then hand off to another
          Haskell thread which does select() on all the outstanding
          IO requests.

This scheme is just for efficiency.  We could (and used to) just call
"safe" read() for every read - that would give you the right concurrency
with -threaded, but unfortunately you'd really notice the difference if
you had 1000s of threads all doing IO, because each one would need its
own OS thread.  The current scheme is rather snappy (even snappier than
non-threaded, as it happens).

You can always do System.Posix.fileRead to get around it.

Cheers,
	Simon