[Haskell-cafe] Re: Cleaning up threads

[Mitar]

Hi!

On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 11:10 PM, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> So rather than admitting defeat here I'd like to see it become the norm to
> write async-exception-safe code.

This is also what I think. You have to make your code work with
exceptions, because they will come sooner or later. So if you handle
them properly, once you have this implemented, then you can easily use
them also for your own stuff.

> It's not that hard, especially with the new mask API coming in GHC 7.0.

Not hard? I see it almost impossible without mask. You cannot have
arbitrary long cleanup functions in for example bracket because
somebody can (and will) interrupt it even if you block, because some
function somewhere deep bellow will unblock. And there is no way to
resume after exception in Haskell.

What would I also like to see in Haskell is that it would be somehow
possible to see which all exceptions could your function (through used
functions there) throw. In this way it would be really possible to
make async-exception-safe functions (as we really do not want
catch-all all around). (Of course the problem with this approach is if
somebody changes underlying function it could get additional possible
exception(s) to be thrown.)

So it would be even better if this would be solved like pattern
matching warning (so you could see if you are missing some exception
through warning) or even better: that type system would enforce you to
or catch or declare throwing/passing exception yourself. Similar how
Java has.

Because one other major Haskell's selling point is that you (are said
to) know from type if and which side-effects a function has. This is
the story behind IO monad. And with exceptions you do not have this
information anymore. I believe this should be visible through type
system.

Something like:

http://paczesiowa.blogspot.com/2010/01/pure-extensible-exceptions-and-self.html

?


Mitar