#13944: Introduce synchronized FFI -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: winter | Owner: (none) Type: feature | Status: new request | Priority: normal | Milestone: 8.4.1 Component: Compiler | Version: 8.0.1 Keywords: | Operating System: Unknown/Multiple Architecture: | Type of failure: None/Unknown Unknown/Multiple | Test Case: | Blocked By: Blocking: | Related Tickets: Differential Rev(s): | Wiki Page: -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- During hacking on ghc I/O libraries, i find an [https://github.com/winterland1989/stdio/tree/master/bench/diskIO interesting situation], to summarize: There're some FFI calls that vary a lot in time duration, this makes unsafe FFI bad because it make GC hard to synchronize all capacities. OTOH safe FFI 's overhead is too large to justify its usage. After some though i think we should Introduce a new FFI type, let call it `synchronized` for now, it should: 1. Have the same requirement as safe FFI of what kind of argument we can pass, e.g. pinned ByteArray, pass by value primitive type, etc. 2. It works like unsafe FFI call by directly jump to c code using current capacity's stack. 3. It should mark current capacity GC ready, and doesn't participate next GC. The point is that if a FFI call doesn't need GC guarantee, then it shouldn't stop GC running. The next GC will not be running with all threads, but that's not too terrible since it doesn't scale too much anyway. -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/13944 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler