base-4.3.1.0: Basic libraries

Portabilitynon-portable (GHC extensions)
Stabilityinternal
Maintainercvs-ghc@haskell.org

GHC.Conc.Sync

Contents

Description

Basic concurrency stuff.

Synopsis

Documentation

data ThreadId Source

A ThreadId is an abstract type representing a handle to a thread. ThreadId is an instance of Eq, Ord and Show, where the Ord instance implements an arbitrary total ordering over ThreadIds. The Show instance lets you convert an arbitrary-valued ThreadId to string form; showing a ThreadId value is occasionally useful when debugging or diagnosing the behaviour of a concurrent program.

Note: in GHC, if you have a ThreadId, you essentially have a pointer to the thread itself. This means the thread itself can't be garbage collected until you drop the ThreadId. This misfeature will hopefully be corrected at a later date.

Note: Hugs does not provide any operations on other threads; it defines ThreadId as a synonym for ().

Constructors

ThreadId ThreadId# 

Forking and suchlike

forkIO :: IO () -> IO ThreadIdSource

Sparks off a new thread to run the IO computation passed as the first argument, and returns the ThreadId of the newly created thread.

The new thread will be a lightweight thread; if you want to use a foreign library that uses thread-local storage, use Control.Concurrent.forkOS instead.

GHC note: the new thread inherits the masked state of the parent (see Control.Exception.mask).

The newly created thread has an exception handler that discards the exceptions BlockedIndefinitelyOnMVar, BlockedIndefinitelyOnSTM, and ThreadKilled, and passes all other exceptions to the uncaught exception handler (see setUncaughtExceptionHandler).

forkIOUnmasked :: IO () -> IO ThreadIdSource

Like forkIO, but the child thread is created with asynchronous exceptions unmasked (see Control.Exception.mask).

forkOnIO :: Int -> IO () -> IO ThreadIdSource

Like forkIO, but lets you specify on which CPU the thread is created. Unlike a forkIO thread, a thread created by forkOnIO will stay on the same CPU for its entire lifetime (forkIO threads can migrate between CPUs according to the scheduling policy). forkOnIO is useful for overriding the scheduling policy when you know in advance how best to distribute the threads.

The Int argument specifies the CPU number; it is interpreted modulo numCapabilities (note that it actually specifies a capability number rather than a CPU number, but to a first approximation the two are equivalent).

forkOnIOUnmasked :: Int -> IO () -> IO ThreadIdSource

Like forkOnIO, but the child thread is created with asynchronous exceptions unmasked (see Control.Exception.mask).

numCapabilities :: IntSource

the value passed to the +RTS -N flag. This is the number of Haskell threads that can run truly simultaneously at any given time, and is typically set to the number of physical CPU cores on the machine.

numSparks :: IO IntSource

Returns the number of sparks currently in the local spark pool

myThreadId :: IO ThreadIdSource

Returns the ThreadId of the calling thread (GHC only).

killThread :: ThreadId -> IO ()Source

killThread raises the ThreadKilled exception in the given thread (GHC only).

 killThread tid = throwTo tid ThreadKilled

throwTo :: Exception e => ThreadId -> e -> IO ()Source

throwTo raises an arbitrary exception in the target thread (GHC only).

throwTo does not return until the exception has been raised in the target thread. The calling thread can thus be certain that the target thread has received the exception. This is a useful property to know when dealing with race conditions: eg. if there are two threads that can kill each other, it is guaranteed that only one of the threads will get to kill the other.

Whatever work the target thread was doing when the exception was raised is not lost: the computation is suspended until required by another thread.

If the target thread is currently making a foreign call, then the exception will not be raised (and hence throwTo will not return) until the call has completed. This is the case regardless of whether the call is inside a mask or not.

Important note: the behaviour of throwTo differs from that described in the paper "Asynchronous exceptions in Haskell" (http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/Papers/asynch-exns.htm). In the paper, throwTo is non-blocking; but the library implementation adopts a more synchronous design in which throwTo does not return until the exception is received by the target thread. The trade-off is discussed in Section 9 of the paper. Like any blocking operation, throwTo is therefore interruptible (see Section 5.3 of the paper). Unlike other interruptible operations, however, throwTo is always interruptible, even if it does not actually block.

There is no guarantee that the exception will be delivered promptly, although the runtime will endeavour to ensure that arbitrary delays don't occur. In GHC, an exception can only be raised when a thread reaches a safe point, where a safe point is where memory allocation occurs. Some loops do not perform any memory allocation inside the loop and therefore cannot be interrupted by a throwTo.

Blocked throwTo is fair: if multiple threads are trying to throw an exception to the same target thread, they will succeed in FIFO order.

par :: a -> b -> bSource

pseq :: a -> b -> bSource

runSparks :: IO ()Source

Internal function used by the RTS to run sparks.

yield :: IO ()Source

The yield action allows (forces, in a co-operative multitasking implementation) a context-switch to any other currently runnable threads (if any), and is occasionally useful when implementing concurrency abstractions.

labelThread :: ThreadId -> String -> IO ()Source

labelThread stores a string as identifier for this thread if you built a RTS with debugging support. This identifier will be used in the debugging output to make distinction of different threads easier (otherwise you only have the thread state object's address in the heap).

Other applications like the graphical Concurrent Haskell Debugger (http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~fhu/chd/) may choose to overload labelThread for their purposes as well.

data ThreadStatus Source

The current status of a thread

Constructors

ThreadRunning

the thread is currently runnable or running

ThreadFinished

the thread has finished

ThreadBlocked BlockReason

the thread is blocked on some resource

ThreadDied

the thread received an uncaught exception

data BlockReason Source

Constructors

BlockedOnMVar

blocked on on MVar

BlockedOnBlackHole

blocked on a computation in progress by another thread

BlockedOnException

blocked in throwTo

BlockedOnSTM

blocked in retry in an STM transaction

BlockedOnForeignCall

currently in a foreign call

BlockedOnOther

blocked on some other resource. Without -threaded, I/O and threadDelay show up as BlockedOnOther, with -threaded they show up as BlockedOnMVar.

TVars

newtype STM a Source

A monad supporting atomic memory transactions.

Constructors

STM (State# RealWorld -> (#State# RealWorld, a#)) 

atomically :: STM a -> IO aSource

Perform a series of STM actions atomically.

You cannot use atomically inside an unsafePerformIO or unsafeInterleaveIO. Any attempt to do so will result in a runtime error. (Reason: allowing this would effectively allow a transaction inside a transaction, depending on exactly when the thunk is evaluated.)

However, see newTVarIO, which can be called inside unsafePerformIO, and which allows top-level TVars to be allocated.

retry :: STM aSource

Retry execution of the current memory transaction because it has seen values in TVars which mean that it should not continue (e.g. the TVars represent a shared buffer that is now empty). The implementation may block the thread until one of the TVars that it has read from has been udpated. (GHC only)

orElse :: STM a -> STM a -> STM aSource

Compose two alternative STM actions (GHC only). If the first action completes without retrying then it forms the result of the orElse. Otherwise, if the first action retries, then the second action is tried in its place. If both actions retry then the orElse as a whole retries.

throwSTM :: Exception e => e -> STM aSource

A variant of throw that can only be used within the STM monad.

Throwing an exception in STM aborts the transaction and propagates the exception.

Although throwSTM has a type that is an instance of the type of throw, the two functions are subtly different:

 throw e    `seq` x  ===> throw e
 throwSTM e `seq` x  ===> x

The first example will cause the exception e to be raised, whereas the second one won't. In fact, throwSTM will only cause an exception to be raised when it is used within the STM monad. The throwSTM variant should be used in preference to throw to raise an exception within the STM monad because it guarantees ordering with respect to other STM operations, whereas throw does not.

catchSTM :: Exception e => STM a -> (e -> STM a) -> STM aSource

Exception handling within STM actions.

alwaysSucceeds :: STM a -> STM ()Source

alwaysSucceeds adds a new invariant that must be true when passed to alwaysSucceeds, at the end of the current transaction, and at the end of every subsequent transaction. If it fails at any of those points then the transaction violating it is aborted and the exception raised by the invariant is propagated.

always :: STM Bool -> STM ()Source

always is a variant of alwaysSucceeds in which the invariant is expressed as an STM Bool action that must return True. Returning False or raising an exception are both treated as invariant failures.

data TVar a Source

Shared memory locations that support atomic memory transactions.

Constructors

TVar (TVar# RealWorld a) 

Instances

newTVar :: a -> STM (TVar a)Source

Create a new TVar holding a value supplied

newTVarIO :: a -> IO (TVar a)Source

IO version of newTVar. This is useful for creating top-level TVars using System.IO.Unsafe.unsafePerformIO, because using atomically inside System.IO.Unsafe.unsafePerformIO isn't possible.

readTVar :: TVar a -> STM aSource

Return the current value stored in a TVar

readTVarIO :: TVar a -> IO aSource

Return the current value stored in a TVar. This is equivalent to

  readTVarIO = atomically . readTVar

but works much faster, because it doesn't perform a complete transaction, it just reads the current value of the TVar.

writeTVar :: TVar a -> a -> STM ()Source

Write the supplied value into a TVar

unsafeIOToSTM :: IO a -> STM aSource

Unsafely performs IO in the STM monad. Beware: this is a highly dangerous thing to do.

  • The STM implementation will often run transactions multiple times, so you need to be prepared for this if your IO has any side effects.
  • The STM implementation will abort transactions that are known to be invalid and need to be restarted. This may happen in the middle of unsafeIOToSTM, so make sure you don't acquire any resources that need releasing (exception handlers are ignored when aborting the transaction). That includes doing any IO using Handles, for example. Getting this wrong will probably lead to random deadlocks.
  • The transaction may have seen an inconsistent view of memory when the IO runs. Invariants that you expect to be true throughout your program may not be true inside a transaction, due to the way transactions are implemented. Normally this wouldn't be visible to the programmer, but using unsafeIOToSTM can expose it.

Miscellaneous

withMVar :: MVar a -> (a -> IO b) -> IO bSource

modifyMVar_ :: MVar a -> (a -> IO a) -> IO ()Source

sharedCAF :: a -> (Ptr a -> IO (Ptr a)) -> IO aSource