On 08/03/10 15:23, John Meacham wrote: > It is more an accident of ghc's design than anything, the same mechanism > that allowed threads to call back into the runtime also allowed them to > be non blocking so the previously used 'safe' and 'unsafe' terms got > re-used. personally, I really don't like those terms, they are > non-descriptive in terms of what they actually mean and presuppose a RTS > similar to ghcs current design. 'reentrant' and 'blocking' which could > be specified independently would be better and would be more > future-proof against changes in the RTS or between compilers. > > John > Okay, that makes a lot more sense. So really when marking a call "safe" or "unsafe" I shouldn't be thinking in terms of whether I want to avoid the increased overhead of allowing it to call back into Haskell, but rather I should be considering whether I want to call to block other threads or not. However, it would seem that within this scheme there is no way for me to specify that a foreign call should be both "blocking" and also allowed to call Haskell functions, which to me would be the "safe"est possible alternative.
Cheers, Greg _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
