Gwern Branwen wrote:
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 9:00 AM, Simon Marlow wrote:
This particular example illustrates a bug in 6.10.1 that we've since fixed:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2783
OK, that's good...
However in general you can still write expressions that don't allocate
anything (e.g. nfib 1000), and your watchdog thread won't get a chance to
run unless there's a spare CPU available (+RTS -N2).
Cheers,
Simon
But that's bad. What are my options here? Will this
threads-not-running issue be fixed in the next release? Since it
worked fine in 6.8 as far as I could tell, that makes me think that it
must not be anything completely fundamental and unfixable.
I'm afraid the underlying problem is one that GHC has always had - that we
can't preempt threads that aren't allocating. It's not easily fixable, we
would have to inject dummy heap checks into every non-allocating loop,
which would seriously hurt performance for those tight loops.
In general you can't rely on being able to kill a thread; however, this
only applies to compiled code, interpreted code should always be
preemptable, even if it isn't allocating.
Cheers,
Simon
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