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

[John Meacham]

On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 04:08:38PM -0400, Nick Bowler wrote:
> On 2010-08-03 15:23 -0700, John Meacham wrote:
> > It is more an accident of ghc's design than anything, the same mechanism
> > that allowed threads to call back into the runtime also allowed them to
> > be non blocking so the previously used 'safe' and 'unsafe' terms got
> > re-used. personally, I really don't like those terms, they are
> > non-descriptive in terms of what they actually mean and presuppose a RTS
> > similar to ghcs current design. '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.
> 
> I thought "safe" meant "the foreign function is allowed to call Haskell
> functions", which seems to not have anything to do with whether the
> function is re-entrant (a very strong condition).
 
Yeah, that is probably not the right term, I was thinking 're-entrant'
as in it re-enters the haskell run-time, but that could cause confusion
with other meanings of that word. Perhaps 'nocallbacks' or 'nohs'
'nonnative'.

        John

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