An MVar t is mutable location that is either empty or contains a value of type t. It has two fundamental operations: putMVar which fills an MVar if it is empty and blocks otherwise, and takeMVar which empties an MVar if it is full and blocks otherwise. They can be used in multiple different ways:

1. As synchronized mutable variables,
2. As channels, with takeMVar and putMVar as receive and send, and
3. As a binary semaphore MVar (), with takeMVar and putMVar as wait and signal.

They were introduced in the paper "Concurrent Haskell" by Simon Peyton Jones, Andrew Gordon and Sigbjorn Finne, though some details of their implementation have since then changed (in particular, a put on a full MVar used to error, but now merely blocks.)

Applicability

MVars offer more flexibility than IORefs, but less flexibility than STM. They are appropriate for building synchronization primitives and performing simple interthread communication; however they are very simple and susceptible to race conditions, deadlocks or uncaught exceptions. Do not use them if you need perform larger atomic operations such as reading from multiple variables: use STM instead.

In particular, the "bigger" functions in this module (readMVar, swapMVar, withMVar, modifyMVar_ and modifyMVar) are simply the composition of a takeMVar followed by a putMVar with exception safety. These only have atomicity guarantees if all other threads perform a takeMVar before a putMVar as well; otherwise, they may block.

Fairness

No thread can be blocked indefinitely on an MVar unless another thread holds that MVar indefinitely. One usual implementation of this fairness guarantee is that threads blocked on an MVar are served in a first-in-first-out fashion, but this is not guaranteed in the semantics.

Gotchas

Like many other Haskell data structures, MVars are lazy. This means that if you place an expensive unevaluated thunk inside an MVar, it will be evaluated by the thread that consumes it, not the thread that produced it. Be sure to evaluate values to be placed in an MVar to the appropriate normal form, or utilize a strict MVar provided by the strict-concurrency package.

Ordering

MVar operations are always observed to take place in the order they are written in the program, regardless of the memory model of the underlying machine. This is in contrast to IORef operations which may appear out-of-order to another thread in some cases.

Example

Consider the following concurrent data structure, a skip channel. This is a channel for an intermittent source of high bandwidth information (for example, mouse movement events.) Writing to the channel never blocks, and reading from the channel only returns the most recent value, or blocks if there are no new values. Multiple readers are supported with a dupSkipChan operation.

A skip channel is a pair of MVars. The first MVar contains the current value, and a list of semaphores that need to be notified when it changes. The second MVar is a semaphore for this particular reader: it is full if there is a value in the channel that this reader has not read yet, and empty otherwise.

     data SkipChan a = SkipChan (MVar (a, [MVar ()])) (MVar ())

     newSkipChan :: IO (SkipChan a)
     newSkipChan = do
         sem <- newEmptyMVar
         main <- newMVar (undefined, [sem])
         return (SkipChan main sem)

     putSkipChan :: SkipChan a -> a -> IO ()
     putSkipChan (SkipChan main _) v = do
         (_, sems) <- takeMVar main
         putMVar main (v, [])
         mapM_ (sem -> putMVar sem ()) sems

     getSkipChan :: SkipChan a -> IO a
     getSkipChan (SkipChan main sem) = do
         takeMVar sem
         (v, sems) <- takeMVar main
         putMVar main (v, sem:sems)
         return v

     dupSkipChan :: SkipChan a -> IO (SkipChan a)
     dupSkipChan (SkipChan main _) = do
         sem <- newEmptyMVar
         (v, sems) <- takeMVar main
         putMVar main (v, sem:sems)
         return (SkipChan main sem)
 

This example was adapted from the original Concurrent Haskell paper. For more examples of MVars being used to build higher-level synchronization primitives, see Chan and QSem.