Proposal: System.Timeout module for base

[Simon Marlow]

Einar Karttunen wrote:
> On 30.01 12:20, Simon Marlow wrote:
>> How would you interrupt the FFI call when the timeout expired? 
>> pthread_cancel(), maybe?
> 
> That is one solution. Just letting it running and returning
> is "good enough" for most things. One common thing would be
> network related functions if implemented in a blocking way (over
> various C libraries). They usually do need timeouts and are
> blocking FFI calls.

I think it would be wrong to leave the FFI call running and still deliver the 
exception to the thread.  Wrong because it leads to surprising behaviour: if the 
blocked call has a side effect, e.g. a write(), then the side-effect may still 
heppen, despite the fact that the Haskell thread has been interrupted by the 
timeout.  And wrong because it's not possible to implement it in GHC, at least 
for bound threads: the OS thread making the foreign call is the only one that 
can execute the Haskell thread.

So that leaves pthread_cancel().  Unfortunately pthread_cancel() isn't really an 
exception - it can be caught, but the handler is for cleaning up only, it can't 
continue.  So this doesn't let us interrupt FFI calls either.

Any other suggestions?

My take on this is that if you want to make an interruptible FFI call, you make 
it in a separate thread, and ensure that if it continues to execute after the 
parent has received an exception, then this is benign.  This is essentially what 
the IO manager thread in the GHC IO library does: any thread blocked on I/O can 
be interrupted by a signal, because it is the IO manager thread performing the 
FFI call.

Cheers,
	Simon