[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: Data.IVar 0.1

[Don Stewart]

lrpalmer:
>    Several very elegant FRP approaches are emerging, most visibly
>    FRP.Reactive, which rely on blocking on multiple variables at once,
>    continuing when the *first* of them is available. . . inside an
>    unsafePerformIO, so the beautiful STM "orElse" solution is not available.
>     The current solution is to race threads against each other, and have the
>    one that finishes first kill the other one.  This is implemented, for
>    example, in Data.Unamb.  However, our empirical tests have shown that the
>    GHC scheduler is not *quite* good enough to handle this efficiently, and
>    ends up introducing too much latency and nondeterminacy.

Cool! Does you IVar implementation have anything in common with previous
proposals for things called IVar (or say, 'ports',
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/ports/)?

What's the background for this abstraction?

-- Don