What are the conditions for safe unsafePerformIO?

[bert2]

Observable sharing in general is unsafe, so we use the IO monad to bound this effect, but can be used safely even with unsafePerformIO if some simple conditions are met.

I can't find any explanations on these conditions. Even bought the paper on ACM in the hopes to find them there :(

[noughtmare]

I don't think the conditions are as simple as the authors claim. But I think the main requirement is that the end result should be independent from the particular sharing structure. For example, the list:

x = 1 : x

Is the same as this list which is unrolled one level:

y = 1 : 1 : y

But reifyGraph would produce two different graphs.

Still, we can write a function over the graphs that always produces the same answer regardless of this unrolling. For example a function that checks if all elements of the graph are equal to 1:

f :: Graph (DeRef [Int]) -> Bool
f (Graph g _) = all (\(_, x) -> case x of NilF -> True; ConsF x _ -> x == 1) g

With this function we can safely use unsafePerformIO:

g :: [Int] -> Bool
g = unsafePerformIO . fmap f . reifyGraph

Edit: Actually, g still seems to be unsafe because it can observe compiler optimizations for this expression:

z = let go () = 1 : go () in go ()

If compiler optimizations are disabled g z will loop infinitely but with optimizations it returns True.

So, I think using unsafePerformIO with reifyGraph is almost always unsafe.