Proposal: add createPipe to base

[Brandon Allbery]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 8:54 AM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 1:47 PM, Ian Lynagh <igloo at earth.li> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 02:32:06PM +0200, Michael Snoyman wrote:
>> > On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com
>> >wrote:
>> > > I propose we add it to System.IO. Note that we'd have to copy the 5
>> lines
>> > > in System.Posix.IO.createPipe into base as the above implementation
>> would
>> > > otherwise depend on the unix package.
>> > >
>> > +1. I've needed this in the past when working with process, and ended up
>> > writing POSIX-only code as a result.
>>
>> Would it make more sense to put it in process, and thus avoid needing to
>> copy/move code into base?
>>
>
> I'm certainly open to that idea. If the only uses of pipes are for
> processes, I think that makes sense. Are there any typical non-process uses
> of pipes? I can't think of any right now.
>

I know of one in C, and it seems potentially applicable to Haskell as well,
but it's mostly(?) a Unix-ism: you allocate a pipe, write to it in a signal
handler, and monitor the read end in an event loop (in Haskell, a thread)
in order to change an asynchronous signal that may have happened when it's
unsafe to e.g. allocate memory into a synchronous event that can be handled
safely. Note that you must use an unbuffered write from System.Posix.IO to
write from the signal handler safely, so this introduces a hard dependency
on the `unix` package; although there may be a win32 equivalent.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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