Proposal: Add Control.Concurrent.forkIOWithUnmask, deprecate forkIOUnmasked
marlowsd at gmail.com
Wed Dec 22 11:50:32 CET 2010
We added forkIOUnmasked as part of the new asynchronous exceptions API
in base 220.127.116.11 (GHC 7.0.1). Unfortunately, forkIOUnmasked isn't very
useful: the computation in the child thread is executed in the unmasked
state, so the child doesn't have a way to reliably set up an exception
handler before an asynchronous exception is raised.
This proposal is to replace forkIOUnmasked with forkIOWithUnmask:
-- | Like 'forkIO', but the child thread is passed a function that can
-- be used to unmask asynchronous exceptions. This function is
-- typically used in the following way
-- > ... mask_ $ forkIOWithUnmask $ \unmask ->
-- > catch (unmask ...) handler
-- so that the exception handler in the child thread is established
-- with asynchronous exceptions masked, meanwhile the main body of
-- the child thread is executed in the unmasked state.
-- Note that the unmask function passed to the child thread should
-- only be used in that thread; the behaviour is undefined if it is
-- invoked in a different thread.
forkIOWithUnmask :: ((forall a . IO a -> IO a) -> IO ()) -> IO ThreadId
forkIOWithUnmask io = forkIO (io unsafeUnmask)
forkIOUnmasked will be deprecated.
Above is almost the entire implementation, hence I didn't bother
attaching a patch to the ticket.
Some discussion leading up to this can be found in
Discussion period: 3 weeks (until 12 Jan 2011)
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