On Feb 12, 2008 6:28 PM, John Lato
Hello,
I was recently looking at the STM library, and I have a question about the function "unsafeIOToSTM". Can anyone explain to me what is unsafe about it, and what sort of use would be considered "safe"?
A few things. First, this will crash:
atomically $ unsafeIOToStm $ atomically $ return ()
The implementation requires that transactions must not be nested, and this function allows you to nest transactions. Also, it's unclear what "retry" means in the context of arbitrary IO actions. A memory transaction is really only defined for exactly that: memory stuff. When you start talking about user I/O, network, etc. the transactional idea breaks down. So mostly the way I think of it is that it's semantically nonsense. Luke