I spent some time this morning trying to use HDBC-mysql to talk to a database. It uses the C mysql bindings, which talks over a blocking socket to the database server. Not surprisingly, it fails reliably when the thread it&#39;s running in is hit by an RTS-initiated alarm signal.<div>
<br></div><div>I&#39;ve managed to make the code *appear* to work successfully with some hacking:</div><div><ul><li>Run in a bound thread</li><li>Use pthread_sigmask to temporarily block SIGALRM and SIGVTALRM to *only* this thread while issuing the sensitive native calls</li>
<li>Profit?</li></ul>What I am wondering is if there&#39;s a practical downside to doing this. Am I going to accidentally kill something? This is a very important gap in the usability of GHC with native libraries, and if this approach actually turns out to be safe in practice, that would be wonderful.</div>