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

[Simon Marlow]

On 13/05/2011 21:12, Bernie Pope wrote:
> On 13 May 2011 19:06, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com
> <mailto:marlowsd at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     As far as memory consistency goes, we claim to provide sequential
>     consistency for IORef and IOArray operations, but not for peeks and
>     pokes.
>
>
> Hi Simon,
>
> Could you please point me to more information about the sequential
> consistency of IORefs? I was looking for something about this recently
> but couldn't find it. I don't see anything in the Haddock for Data.IORef.

Yes, it's not actually documented as far as I know, and we should fix 
that.  But if you think about it, sequential consistency is really the 
only sensible policy: suppose one processor creates a heap object and 
writes a reference to it in the IORef, then another processor reads the 
IORef.  The writes that created the heap object must be visible to the 
second processor, otherwise it will encounter uninitialised memory and 
crash.  So sequential consistency is necessary to ensure concurrent 
programs can't crash.

Now perhaps it's possible to have a relaxed memory model that provides 
the no-crashes guarantee but still allows IORef writes to be reordered 
(e.g. some kind of causal consistency).  That might be important if 
there is some processor arcitecture that provides that memory model, but 
as far as I know there isn't.

For some background there was a discussion about this on the 
haskell-prime mailing list a few years ago, I think.

Cheers,
	Simon