[Haskell-cafe] Safe FFI calls, -threaded and killThread

25 Oct 2005

      Hello

I noticed that killThread in GHC behaves in a problematic fashion with
-threaded when the killed thread is in a midle of performing a safe
FFI call. If the behaviour (blocking until the call is done) is intended
adding documentation might be nice.

The example below demonstrates the problem. Tthe program gets stuck
in the killThread call which is not very intuitive. Wrapping every
killThread in forkIO does not sound very nice either.

- Einar Karttunen

import Control.Concurrent
import Foreign.C

foreign import ccall threadsafe "sleep" sleep :: CInt -> IO CInt

main = do mv <- newEmptyMVar
          tid <- forkIO $ sleep 100 >> putMVar mv ()
          threadDelay 10000
          e <- isEmptyMVar mv
          if e then do putStrLn "killing sleeper"
                       killThread tid
                       putStrLn "done"
               else do putStrLn "sleeper already done"