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simonmar authored
Main threads are now not kept alive artificially, so it is possible for a main thread to be sent the BlockedOnDeadMVar exception. Main threads are no longer GC roots. This involved cleaning up the weak pointer processing somewhat, and separating the processing of real weak pointers from the processing of the all_threads list (which can be thought of as "weaker pointers": a finalizer can keep a blocked thread alive, but not vice-versa). The new story is described in a detailed comment in GC.c. One interesting consequence is that it's much harder to get a Deadlock exception now - many deadlock situations involving main threads will turn into BlockedOnDeadMVar situations instead. For example, if there are a group of threads in a circular deadlock, then they will all be sent BlockedOnDeadMVar simultaneously, whereas before if one of them was the main thread it would be sent Deadlock. It's really hard to get Deadlock now - you have to somehow keep an MVar independently reachable, eg. by using a StablePtr.
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