Proposal: Control.Concurrent.Async

[Thomas Schilling]

I fixed the docs a tiny bit in: https://github.com/simonmar/async/pull/1

Other comments:

  - Module introduction is missing.

  - There are no tests whatsoever.  I would like to have a few stress
tests that throw lots of asynchronous exceptions to make sure that
exception masking etc behaves correctly.

  - Why is there no waitAnyCancel?
  - Same with waitEitherCancel

On 8 June 2012 09:37, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to add a higher-level concurrency API to the base package. This API
> has grown while I've been working on examples for my book, and I'm convinced
> that we should have something like this in the standard libraries.  Here's
> the API I propose:
>
> http://community.haskell.org/~simonmar/async-stm/Control-Concurrent-Async.html
>
> In fact it already exists in at least two packages on Hackage: 'async' and
> 'threads'.  My version is a superset of both of these, except for a few
> small differences (which are up for discussion, of course).
>
> One good reason to have this package is that it avoids some common pitfalls,
> such as forgetting to handle exceptions in your child threads.  In the Async
> API, you get to choose whether to (a) receive the result as 'Either
> SomeException a', or (b) have the exception re-thrown in the waiting thread.
>  You don't get to ignore it altogether.
>
> Another common pitfall avoided by this library is accidentally leaving
> threads running in the background.  This is handled by withAsync:
>
>  withAsync :: IO a -> (Async a -> IO b) -> IO b
>
> the child thread is always cancelled (i.e. killed) when the second argument
> returns or throws an exception, if it hasn't finished already.
>
>
> I'm opening this up for discussion so that we can tidy up any inconsistent
> details and add any functions that people feel are missing.  Naming is
> obviously up for discussion too.
>
> Cheers,
>        Simon
>
>
>
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