Re: [Haskell-cafe] Windows: openFile gives permission denied whenfile in use

On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 10:53 AM, Donn Cave wrote:

Quoth Andrew Coppin ,

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On 29/12/2011 04:29 AM, Antoine Latter wrote: ...

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This bug and its discussion is similar, but not identical: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/4363

This one has been rumbling on for ages. As others have said, the Report demands that locking occur, which is probably a mistake.

The rationale that followed may have been a little sketchy, but apparently everyone agrees with with the point.  I see the ticket led to a discussion on the libraries list - http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2011-October/016978.html

... wherein Ian Lynagh proposed to remove this feature and let the programmer enforce locking or not, as in other programming languages' base I/O libraries.  This met with enthusiastic universal support, so whatever the Report may say, it looks to me like the GHC libraries will eventually not do this.

Wouldn't this lead to 'getContents' and friends being much less safe than they already are? Or would we have to do something at the GHC runtime level of things to add locking? Antoine