There is extra work done to make this safe. See the following: https://github.com/ghc/ghc/blob/af6746fb6b5adb5ba5be6e0f647c4ebe767ce084/rts... https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5558 Ryan On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Mikulas Patocka < mikulas@artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz> wrote:
Also note linked from the global variables page on the wiki is: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Top_level_mutable_state
Important for the `unsafePerformIO` option is the NOINLINE pragma to ensure that only one global variable exists. In the STM case it is also important to use `newTVarIO` rather then `unsafePerformIO $ atomically newTVar` which does not work.
Ryan
Hi
I think it isn't correct even with NOINLINE.
Read the paper "Haskell on a Shared-Memory Multiprocessor" http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/67424/2005-haskell.pdf
Among other things, the paper presents these ideas:
(section 3.1) When multiple threads start to evaluate the same thunk concurrently, we could use interlocked compare-and-swap instruction to make sure that only one thread starts to evaluate it. However, the compare-and-swap instruction is slow and executing it at every thunk evaluation decreases performance. So, the designers avoid the compare-and-swap instruction (section 3.2) and consequently there is a race condition - there is a small window where two or more threads may evaluate the same thunk concurrently.
Normally, this race condition doesn't matter, because Haskell is purely functional language, so when multiple threads evaluate the same thunk they end up with the same result - but in this particular example, where one is using unsafePerformIO to construct a unique variable, it can hurt, because you end up executing "unsafePerformIO $ newMVar 0" concurrently (section 3.5 of the paper).
So - code like this isn't correct, the numbers returned by "uniq" may not be unique if we hit the race condition when evaluating "global":
global :: MVar Integer global = unsafePerformIO $ newMVar 0 {-# NOINLINE global #-} uniq = modifyMVar global (\i -> return (i+1,i))
Has anything changed since that time, so that this construct is safe?
Mikulas