Maintainer	Bas van Dijk <v.dijk.bas@gmail.com> , Roel van Dijk <vandijk.roel@gmail.com>

Control.Concurrent.Event

Description

An Event is a simple mechanism for communication between threads: one thread signals an event and other threads wait for it.

Each event has an internal State which is either Set or Cleared. This state can be changed with the corresponding functions set and clear. The wait function blocks until the state is Set. An important property of setting an event is that all threads waiting for it are woken.

It was inspired by the Python Event object. See:

http://docs.python.org/3.1/library/threading.html#event-objects

This module is designed to be imported qualified. We suggest importing it like:

 import           Control.Concurrent.Event          ( Event )
 import qualified Control.Concurrent.Event as Event ( ... )

Synopsis

Documentation

data Event Source

An event is in one of two possible states: Set or Cleared.

Instances

Eq Event
Typeable Event

data State Source

The internal state of an Event. Only interesting when you use the state function.

Constructors

Cleared
Set

Instances

Enum State
Eq State
Ord State
Read State
Show State
Typeable State

new :: IO Event Source

Create an event. The initial state is Cleared.

wait :: Event -> IO ()Source

Block until the event is set.

If the state of the event is already Set this function will return immediately. Otherwise it will block until another thread calls set.

You can also stop a thread that is waiting for an event by throwing an asynchronous exception.

waitTimeout :: Event -> Int -> IO Bool Source

Block until the event is set or until a timer expires.

Like wait but with a timeout. A return value of False indicates a timeout occurred.

The timeout is specified in microseconds. A timeout of 0 μs will cause the function to return False without blocking in case the event state is Cleared. Negative timeouts are treated the same as a timeout of 0 μs. The maximum timeout is constrained by the range of the Int type. The Haskell standard guarantees an upper bound of at least 2^29-1 giving a maximum timeout of at least (2^29-1) / 10^6 = ~536 seconds.

set :: Event -> IO ()Source

Changes the state of the event to Set. All threads that where waiting for this event are woken. Threads that wait after the state is changed to Set will not block at all.

clear :: Event -> IO ()Source

Changes the state of the event to Cleared. Threads that wait after the state is changed to Cleared will block until the state is changed to Set.

state :: Event -> IO State Source

Determines the current state of the event.

Notice that this is only a snapshot of the state. By the time a program reacts on its result it may already be out of date. This can be avoided by synchronizing access to the event between threads.