"Simon Marlow" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >> The portable interface could be Control.Concurrent.MVar, perhaps.
>
> I don't really understand the problem, maybe I'm missing something. I
> thought the idea would be that a thread-safe library would simply use
> MVar instead of IORef.
I was misled by several people's hand-waving assertion that, provided
you used MVars "correctly", there would be no synchronisation problems.
But no-one had yet defined what "correct" meant. I kind of assumed they
meant you could write concurrent threaded code (with only some minor
restrictions) and have it work in a single-threaded implementation
without change. This seemed like a pretty strong (and dubious) claim to
me.
But now I see you are actually saying something quite different. (And I
recall some discussion on these points from a few months ago.)
* IORef is inherently thread-unsafe, and so we should eliminate IORefs
from the language.
* One can write single-threaded code using MVars instead of IORefs,
and it will be safe on a multi-threaded implementation.
The latter point is quite the opposite of what I thought was being
proposed.
Regards,
Malcolm
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