[Haskell-cafe] Why do "unsafe" foreign calls block other threads?

[John Meacham]

On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 03:48:57PM -0400, wren ng thornton wrote:
> John Meacham wrote:
>> 'reentrant' and 'blocking' which could
>> be specified independently would be better and would be more
>> future-proof against changes in the RTS or between compilers.
>
> +1.
>
> Perhaps we should propose it to the haskell' committee.

It is already on the wiki mixed in under 'concurrency'. It was discussed
at length, the general consensus was that even if concurrency isn't in
the standard, we should make these annotations part of it so FFI
bindings could be written that would be portable between concurrent and
non-concurrent implementations. 

The actual naming of the annotations and what the default should be got
into some serious dogshedding which I'd hate to re-hash, but most
anything would be better than 'safe' and 'unsafe' IMHO.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈ - http://notanumber.net/