Neil Mitchell wrote:
I guess the "nested calls to parallel_" bit is the part of the spec that makes everything much harder!
Thanks
Neil
Yes. Much more annoying. But the problem here is generic. To avoid it you must never allow all thread to block at once. The parallel_ function is such a job, so you solved this with the 'idempotent' trick. You solution works by blocking all but 1 thread. 1a) Some worker thread 1 executes parallel_ with some jobs 1b) These get submitted the work queue 'chan' 1c) worker thread 1 starts on those same jobs, ignoring the queue 1d) worker thread 1 reaches the job being processed by thread 2 1e) worker thread 1 blocks until the jobs is finished in modifyMVar 2a) Worker thread 2 grabs a job posted by thread 1, that calls parallel_ 2b) This batch of jobs gets submitted to the work queue 'chan' 2c) worker thread 2 starts on those same jobs, ignoring the queue 1d) worker thread 2 reaches the job being processed by thread 3 1e) worker thread 2 blocks until the jobs is finished in modifyMVar 3...4...5... And now only 1 thread is still working, and it has to work in series. I think I can fix this...