[Haskell-cafe] Re: Data.Unique not "safe" in concurrent environments (or brain burned)?

[Neil Davies]

Let me answer this myself - brain burnt...

Of course it is OK, that is precisely the semantics of MVars - the are
empty or full, thus assuring the mutual exclusion between threads.

Been a hard week.....

Neil
... so the deeper question - why don't you realise these mistakes till
five minutes *after* you've pressed the send button....

Neil Davies wrote:
> Hi, I was looking over the libraries for bits of GHC (no doubt a standard form of 
> relaxation for readers of this list), and noticed the following statement 
> (in Data.Unique):
>
>  -- | Creates a new object of type 'Unique'.  The value returned will
>  -- not compare equal to any other value of type 'Unique' returned by
>  -- previous calls to 'newUnique'.  
>
> This set me thinking - so I looked at the code 
>
> newUnique :: IO Unique
> newUnique = do
>    val <- takeMVar uniqSource
>    let next = val+1
>    putMVar uniqSource next
>    return (Unique next)
>
> In the concurrent execution world in which we live - I don't think that the implementation 
> supports the "uniqueness" statement above - or am I not understanding something?
>
> Cheers
>
> Neil
>
>
>