On 16/02/2010 15:51, Roel van Dijk wrote:
Hello,
We wrote a small library (1) which offers a few extra synchronization
primitives. These primitives are found in the standard libraries of
languages like Java and Python, but not in Haskell.
Before releasing concurrent-extra on hackage, we would like some
comments on its name, design, implementation, documentation (2) and
general usefulness.
All primitives are implemented with MVars and IORefs, except for
Control.Concurrent.STM.Event.
There is a small test suite which tests some properties:
cabal configure -ftest
cabal build
cabal test
The test suite still needs to be expanded a great deal. We found that
testing concurrent algorithms is really hard. Now we test things like
"this shouldn't deadlock" by checking if it doesn't take too long. But
that doesn't feel very formal. Is there a more principled approach to
testing concurrent algorithms in Haskell?
You might want to take a look at the concurrency part of the GHC test suite:
http://darcs.haskell.org/testsuite/tests/ghc-regress/concurrent/should_run/
Not that we've really solved the problem you're talking about, but you
might get some ideas.
Often deadlocks are caught by the RTS and result in an exception which
you can catch, though with the threaded RTS this relies on detecting
idle time and running the GC, which by default happens after 0.3s of
idle time. Some people find this annoying and turn off the idle-time GC
(+RTS -I0) but then you lose deadlock detection. Swings and roundabouts.
Cheers,
Simon
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