Sorry. I just found the answer to this in the manual:
"When you call a foreign imported function that is annotated as safe (the
default), and the program was linked using -threaded, then the call will
run concurrently with other running Haskell threads. If the program was
linked without -threaded, then the other Haskell threads will be blocked
until the call returns."
"This means that if you need to make a foreign call to a function that
takes a long time or blocks indefinitely, then you should mark it safe and
use -threaded. Some library functions make such calls internally; their
documentation should indicate when this is the case."
On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 8:23 AM Andrew Martin
According to the FFI chapter [1] in the GHC manual, the safe FFI is useful when you need to call a C function that can call back into haskell code. I had always assumed that the scheduler could somehow interrupt safe FFI calls, but the manual does not indicate this, and in some recent testing I did in the posix library [2], I found that scheduling interrupts definitely do not happen. With the non-threaded runtime, the following test always hangs:
testSocketsD :: IO () testSocketsD = do (a,b) <- demand =<< S.socketPair P.unix P.datagram P.defaultProtocol _ <- forkIO $ do bytesSent <- demand =<< S.sendByteArray b sample 0 5 mempty when (bytesSent /= 5) (fail "testSocketsD: bytesSent was wrong") actual <- demand =<< S.receiveByteArray a 5 mempty actual @=? sample
sample :: ByteArray sample = E.fromList [1,2,3,4,5]
demand :: Either Errno a -> IO a demand = either (\e -> ioError (errnoToIOError "test" e Nothing Nothing)) pure
In the above example, sendByteArray and receiveByteArray are safe FFI wrappers around send and recv. It is necessary to use threadWaitRead and threadWaitWrite before these calls to predictably get the correct behavior.
This brings to my question. In issue #34 on the github library for the unix package [3], there is a discussion about whether to use the safe or unsafe FFI for various POSIX system calls. On the issue there is strong consensus that the safe FFI calls lead to better performance.
Simon Marlow writes [4] that "Unsafe foreign imports which can block for unpredictable amounts of time cause performance problems that only emerge when scaling to multiple cores, because they delay the GC sync. This is a really annoying problem if it happens to you, because it's almost impossible to diagnose, and if it happens due to an unsafe call in a library then it's also really hard to fix."
And Gregory Collins adds that "If the call would ever block (and that includes most filesystem functions) that means you want 'safe'."
There's something I'm definitely missing. My experience is that safe FFI calls do not help with blocking IO (again, I've been using the non-threaded runtime, but I doubt this makes a difference), that they only help with C functions that call back into haskell. However, a lot of other people seem to have a difference experience.
[1] https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/ffi-chap.htm... [2] https://github.com/andrewthad/posix [3] https://github.com/haskell/unix/issues/34 [4] https://github.com/haskell/unix/issues/34#issuecomment-68683424
-- -Andrew Thaddeus Martin
-- -Andrew Thaddeus Martin