This section describes features specific to GHC's implementation of Concurrent Haskell.
In a standalone GHC program, only the main thread is required to terminate in order for the process to terminate. Thus all other forked threads will simply terminate at the same time as the main thread (the terminology for this kind of behaviour is ``daemonic threads'').
If you want the program to wait for child threads to finish before exiting, you need to program this yourself. A simple mechanism is to have each child thread write to an MVar when it completes, and have the main thread wait on all the MVars before exiting:
myForkIO :: IO () -> IO (MVar ()) myForkIO io = do mvar <- newEmptyMVar forkIO (io `finally` putMVar mvar ()) return mvar |
Note that we use finally from the Exception module to make sure that the MVar is written to even if the thread dies or is killed for some reason.
A better method is to keep a global list of all child threads which we should wait for at the end of the program:
children :: MVar [MVar ()] children = unsafePerformIO (newMVar []) waitForChildren :: IO () waitForChildren = do (mvar:mvars) <- takeMVar children putMVar children mvars takeMVar mvar waitForChildren forkChild :: IO () -> IO () forkChild io = do mvar <- newEmptyMVar forkIO (p `finally` putMVar mvar ()) childs <- takeMVar children putMVar children (mvar:childs) later = flip finally main = later waitForChildren $ ... |
The main thread principle also applies to calls to Haskell from outside, using foreign export. When the foreign exported function is invoked, it starts a new main thread, and it returns when this main thread terminates. If the call causes new threads to be forked, they may remain in the system after the foreign exported function has returned.
GHC implements pre-emptive multitasking: the execution of threads are interleaved in a random fashion. More specifically, a thread may be pre-empted whenever it allocates some memory, which unfortunately means that tight loops which do no allocation tend to lock out other threads (this only seems to happen with pathalogical benchmark-style code, however).
The rescheduling timer runs on a 20ms granularity by default, but this may be altered using the -i<n> RTS option. After a rescheduling “tick” the running thread is pre-empted as soon as possible.
One final note: the aaaa/bbbb example may not work too well on GHC (see Section 2.3), due to the locking on a Handle. Only one thread may hold the lock on a Handle at any one time, so if a reschedule happens while a thread is holding the lock, the other thread won't be able to run. The upshot is that the switch from aaaa to bbbbb happens infrequently. It can be improved by lowering the reschedule tick period. We also have a patch that causes a reschedule whenever a thread waiting on a lock is woken up, but haven't found it to be useful for anything other than this example :-)