[Haskell] Re: Safe forking question

[Simon Marlow]

Chris Kuklewicz wrote:
> In response to question by Cat Dancer <cat at catdancer.ws> I wrote a few tests of
> sending asynchronous signal to a thread using GHC 6.6
> 
> The goal was to run a child thread via forkIO and use handle or finally to respond
> to the thread's demise.
> 
> Unfortunately, it seems that there is an irreducible window where this fails.  The
> forkIO returns but any exception handlers such as block/handle/catch/finally are
> not in place yet.

We might consider it a bug that a new thread is started in "async exceptions 
unblocked" mode.  It's true that this does mean there's no way to reliably start 
a thread and guarantee to know if it is killed.

Starting threads in 'blocked' mode isn't the answer.  That would force everyone 
to add an 'unblock' to their forkIO's after setting up an exception handler, and 
that's too easy to forget (and not backwards compatible).  So instead we could 
introduce a new abstraction:

   forkCatchIO :: (Exception -> IO ()) -> IO () -> IO ThreadId

which combines forkIO with catch in an atomic way, such that the handler is 
guaranteed to execute if the thread receives an exception.  You can implement 
this using an MVar and not returning the ThreadId until the child thread is 
inside the exception handler (as in your example): this is ok because the only 
way a thread can receive an exception is by knowing its ThreadId.  However it's 
less than perfect in performance terms; if we had a primitive fork that created 
a thread in blocked mode we could do much better.

If there's some agreement that this is the way to go, I'll file a task for GHC 
and try to get to it before 6.8.

Cheers,
	Simon