This post was adapted from a post I made to the glasgow-haskell-users list.

According to Control.Exception, the BlockedIndefinitelyOnMVar exception (and related exception BlockedIndefinitelyOnSTM ) is thrown when “the thread is blocked on an MVar, but there are no other references to the MVar so it can't ever continue.” The description is actually reasonably precise, but it is easy to misinterpret. Fully understanding how this exception works requires some extra documentation from Control.Concurrent as well as an intuitive feel for how garbage collection in GHC works with respects to Haskell’s green threads.

Here’s the litmus test: can you predict what these three programs will do?

main1 = do lock <- newMVar () forkIO $ takeMVar lock forkIO $ takeMVar lock threadDelay 1000 -- let threads run performGC -- trigger exception threadDelay 1000 main2 = do lock <- newEmptyMVar complete <- newEmptyMVar forkIO $ takeMVar lock `finally` putMVar complete () takeMVar complete main3 = do lock <- newEmptyMVar forkIO $ takeMVar lock `finally` putMVar lock () let loop = do b <- isEmptyMVar lock if b then yield >> performGC >> loop else return () loop

Try not to peek. For a hint, check the documentation for forkIO.

The first program gives no output, even though the threadDelay ostensibly lets both forked threads get scheduled, run, and deadlocked. In fact, BlockedIndefinitelyOnMVar is raised, and the reason you don’t see it is because forkIO installs an exception handler that mutes this exception, along with BlockedIndefinitelyOnSTM and ThreadKilled . You can install your own exception handler using catch and co.

There is an interesting extra set of incants at the end of this program that ensure, with high probability, that the threads get scheduled and the BlockedIndefinitelyOnMVar exception gets thrown. Notice that the exception only gets thrown when “no references are left to the MVar.” Since Haskell is a garbage collected language, the only time it finds out references are gone are when garbage collections happen, so you need to make sure one of those occurs before you see one of these errors.

One implication of this is that GHC does not magically know which thread to throw the exception at to “unwedge” the program: instead, it will just throw BlockedIndefinitelyOnMVar at all of the deadlocked threads, including (if applicable) the main thread. This behavior is demonstrated in the second program, where the program terminates with BlockedIndefinitelyOnMVar because the main thread gets a copy of the exception, even though the finally handler of the child thread would have resolved the deadlock. Try replacing the last line with takeMVar complete `catch` \BlockedIndefinitelyOnMVar -> takeMVar complete >> putStrLn "done" . It’s pretty hilarious.

The last program considers what it means for an MVar to be “reachable”. As it deadlocks silently, this must mean the MVar stayed reachable; and indeed, our reference isEmptyMVar prevents the MVar from ever going dead, and thus we loop infinitely, even though there was no possibility of the MVar getting filled in. GHC only knows that a thread can be considered garbage (which results in the exception being thrown) if there are no references to it. Who is holding a reference to the thread? The MVar , as the thread is blocking on this data structure and has added itself to the blocking list of this. Who is keeping the MVar alive? Why, our closure that contains a call to isEmptyMVar . So the thread stays. The general rule is as follows: if a thread is blocked on an MVar which is accessible from a non-blocked thread, the thread sticks around. While there are some obvious cases (which GHC doesn’t manage) where the MVar is obviously dead, even if there are references sticking around to it, figuring this out in general is undecidable. (Exercise: Write a program that solves the halting problem if GHC was able to figure this out in general.)