[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: iterIO-0.1 - iteratee-based IO with pipe operators

[Gregory Collins]

Hi David,

Re: this comment from catchI:

> It is not possible to catch asynchronous exceptions, such as lazily evaluated divide-by-zero errors, the throw function, or exceptions raised by other threads using throwTo if those exceptions might arrive anywhere outside of a liftIO call.

It might be worth investigating providing a version which can catch
asynchronous exceptions if the underlying monad supports it (via
MonadCatchIO or something similar). One of the most interesting
advantages I can see for IterIO over the other iteratee
implementations is that you actually have some control over resource
usage -- not being able to catch asynchronous exceptions nullifies
much of that advantage. A clear use case for this is timeouts on
server threads, where you typically throw a TimeoutException exception
to the handling thread using "throwTo" if the timeout is exceeded.

Another question re: resource cleanup: in the docs I see:

> Now suppose inumHttpBody fails (most likely because it receives an EOF before reading the number of bytes specified in the Content-Length header). Because inumHttpBody is fused to handler, the failure will cause handler to receive an EOF, which will cause foldForm to fail, which will cause handleI to receive an EOF and return, which will ensure hClose runs and the file handle h is not leaked.

> Once the EOFs have been processed, the exception will propagate upwards making inumHttpServer fail, which in turn will send an EOF to iter. Then the exception will cause enum to fail, after which sock will be closed. In summary, despite the complex structure of the web server, because all the components are fused together with pipe operators, corner cases like this just work with no need to worry about leaked file descriptors.

Could you go into a little bit of detail about the mechanism behind this?

Thanks!

G
-- 
Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>