[mercury-users] .par grades of Mercury: are they safe?

[Fergus Henderson]

On 21-Nov-2004, Dominique de Waleffe <ddw at missioncriticalit.com> wrote:
> I spotted the following paragraphs in the NEWS file of the current ROTD.
> >>>
> Changes to the Mercury compiler:
> 
> * Due to personnel changes and semantic problems in the design of
>  POSIX threads and problems in the implementations thereof that we have 
>  tried,
>  we cannot guarantee that we will be able to fix low-level concurrency bugs 
>  in
>  .par grades.
> <<<
> 
> That makes me worried. 

One of the drawbacks of using ROTD releases is that sometimes they
are not as well polished and reviewed as official releases.
IMHO that text does not belong in the NEWS file.  This issue with
the NEWS file was picked up by reviewers on the mercury-reviews
mailing list, but the NEWS file has not yet been corrected.

> We are using the hlc.par.gc grade for a big application for a 
> commercial customer (objective is 300 concurrent users) and I would 
> like to know what are those bugs being talked about

The only reported bug so far is that when the main thread exits,
the whole program terminates, even if there are other threads
still running.

-- 
Fergus Henderson                    |  "I have always known that the pursuit
                                    |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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