[Haskell-cafe] Re: Asynchronous exception wormholes kill modularity

[Simon Marlow]

On 07/04/10 21:23, Bas van Dijk wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Simon Marlow<marlowsd at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Comments?
>
> I really like this design.
>
> One question, are you planning to write the MVar utility functions
> using 'mask' or using 'nonInterruptibleMask'? As in:
>
>> withMVar :: MVar a ->  (a ->  IO b) ->  IO b
>> withMVar m f = whichMask? $ \restore ->  do
>>    a<- takeMVar m
>>    b<- restore (f a) `onException` putMVar m a
>>    putMVar m a
>>    return b

Definitely the ordinary interruptible mask.  It is the intention that 
the new nonInterruptibleMask is only used in exceptional circumstances 
where dealing with asynchronous exceptions emerging from blocking 
operations would be impossible to deal with.  The more unwieldy name was 
chosen deliberately for this reason.

The danger with nonInterruptibleMask is that it is all too easy to write 
a program that will be unresponsive to Ctrl-C, for example.  It should 
be used with great care - for example when there is reason to believe 
that any blocking operations that would otherwise be interruptible will 
only block for short bounded periods.

In the case of withMVar, if the caller is concerned about the 
interruptibility then they can call it within nonInterruptibleMask, 
which overrides the interruptible mask in withMVar.

Cheers,
	Simon