John Goerzen wrote:
Duncan Coutts wrote:
On Mon, 2008-12-22 at 10:30 +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
The terminology seems counter-intuitive, but in other other words, a "safe" call is slower but more flexible, an "unsafe" call is fast and dangerous. Therefore it is always OK to convert an "unsafe" declaration into a "safe" one, but never OK to convert from "safe" to "unsafe" without looking at what the foreign side actually does. And in general we would not even bother with considering using "unsafe" for calls that are already expensive. It's only worth considering when the length of the call is always very short.
For example in a database library it might make sense to use 'unsafe' on the data-access functions that extract data from a local query result but we should always use 'safe' on any DB function that might want to talk to the network (eg to get more query results).
It's difficult to anticipate the needs here. For instance, some people may be using a few very-long-running queries measured in minutes, such as the original poster. Other people, such as web app developers, may be issuing literally millions of queries, right after another, where the difference matters.
I'd be really interested to know whether you can actually measure a difference between safe and unsafe foreign calls for something complicated like a database query. Do you have any figures? If it turns out that "safe" calls are a bottleneck, then there might be room for optimisation there.
I had initially used "unsafe" because of the documented performance benefit, plus I certainly am not expecting Sqlite to call back into the Haskell runtime.
It seems to me strange that using "unsafe" instead of "safe" would have negative implications for threading. After all, as Malcolm said above, "it is always OK to convert an unsafe declaration into a safe one". So could the compiler be made to be smart enough to do so when it is advantageous for threading purposes?
It's not possible to make the choice at runtime without compromising the efficiency of "unsafe" calls. An "unsafe" call is just an inline call to the C function, whereas a "safe" call is wrapped in a couple of calls into the RTS to save/restore the Haskell state. Cheers, Simon