[Haskell-cafe] ANN: asynchronous-exceptions

[Roman Cheplyaka]

* Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> [2014-02-05 17:55:10+0200]
> * If an asynchronous-type exception is caught and then rethrown as a
> synchronous exception, the type-based approach will still treat it as
> asynchronous, though it should be recognized as synchronous at that point.

I say it shouldn't. I usually don't care by what means an exception was
thrown. I care that exceptions that are meant to be thrown
asynchronously (that is: they do not originate from the currently
executing code in the current thread, but are some indication of an
outside event) are not treated the same as exceptions that arise from
the code in the current thread.

Example:

  {-# LANGUAGE ScopedTypeVariables #-}
  import System.Timeout
  import Control.Concurrent
  import Control.Exception
  import Control.Exception.Async

  main = do
    timeout (10^5) $
      (threadDelay (10^6) `catch` (\(_ :: IOException) -> print 1))
        `catchSync` (\_ -> print 2)

I don't expect any of the exception handlers here to fire because
threadDelay doesn't throw any exceptions. This is my intention. The fact
that, as Edsko points out, exception are re-thrown synchronously, is a
subtle technicality and I don't want to care about it. Remember that 

  threadDelay (10^6) `catch` (\(_ :: IOException) -> print 1)

sits somewhere deep inside a user-supplied action. Thus, the semantics
of my clear-intentioned code

  timeout (10^5) $ userAction `catchSync` (\_ -> print 2)

in the approach you advocate would depend on whether, somewhere deep
inside a library used by the user action, any exceptions are caught.
This is not compositional nor useful.

Roman
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20140205/62a64f2a/attachment.sig>