FFI, safe vs unsafe

[Simon Marlow]

On 30 March 2006 13:05, John Meacham wrote:

> but the debugging/deterministic
> benefits could be useful. you could be guarenteed to reproduce a given
> sequence of context switches which could make finding concurrent
> heisenbugs easier.

Actually +RTS -C0 already gives deterministic concurrency in GHC.  And
you're right, it's essential for debugging.  SMP has made my life
somewhat more painful of late :-)

> or something like concurrent 'hat' or another
> debugger might find it easier to work in such a mode.
> 
> In any case, what I think of when I think of 'writing a portable app'
> is that from _the spec alone_ I can write something that I can expect
> to work on any compliant system. This goal can be achieved to various
> degrees. But if the specification says, 'the implementation might be
> cooperative' and I write assuming that, then it pretty much will
> definitly work anywhere perhaps with some spurious 'yields'.

Absolutely, but a preemptive implementation has no way to tell you if
you missed out a 'yield', and that essentially is the same as
non-portabiliy.  It doesn't matter that the spec told you you needed the
yield, if the implementation you're using works fine without it,
non-portable software will be the result.

What's more, in some cases it isn't even possible to insert enough
yields.  It's entirely reasonable to have an application that runs some
CPU-bound pure computation in one thread and a GUI in some other
threads.  This type of application can't be implemented if the standard
guarantees nothing more than cooperative scheduling.  Worse, no static
property of the code tells you that.

> however
> if it says something to the effect of 'runnable threads will be
> timeshared via some fair algorithm for some definition of fair'

No, I'm suggesting the specific fairness guarantees mentioned earlier
(and on the wiki page).

> then
> it doesn't help much writing portable apps since you would want to
> test on the various compilers to see what their definiton of "fair"
> is.

Given those fairness guarantees, programmers will not need to care
whether the implementation is using preemption based on allocation, or
one based on reductions, or arbitrary inter-instruction preemption.
Because it is hard to write a program that can tell the difference,
especially if you stick to using proper synchronisation primitives,
nobody will do it by accident.

Contrast this with a standard that allows both cooperative and
preemptive scheduling.  It's much easier to write a program that can
show the difference, and I'm worried that people will do it all the
time, by accident.  That's bad.

> I thought yhc supported unboxed values, so a loop like
> 
> count 0 = 0
> count n = count (n - 1)
> 
> count 100000
> 
> could block the runtime (assuming it was properly unboxed by the
> compiler) since it never calls back into it and is just a straight up
> countdown loop?

are we talking about the same compiler?  YHC is fully interpreted, has
no unboxed types, and AFAIK it is impossible to write any code that
doesn't get preempted after a while.

Cheers,
	Simon