By Michael SnoymanThis is just a word of warning for Yesod users. There appears to be a serious bug in GHC 7.4.2 which can be triggered when using Persistent. We've experienced this quite a few times at FP Complete, but have never been able to get a minimal reproducing test case. Recently an issue was filed with the same behavior, and John Wiegley recommended I write a blog post to warn users.
The problem comes up when using the get404 function. It seems that under some
circumstances, this function will return an invalid value if the given key does
not exist. If this value is then used, it results in a segfault of the process.
If this situation arises, you can work around the problem by using get and
case statements. Please see my comments on the Github
issue for
more details.
This bug does not seem to exist on the GHC 7.6 series, so upgrading GHC versions may be the simplest way to prevent this problem.
If anyone has minimal examples of this occurring, please email me, I'd love to include a test case for this in either the Persistent or Yesod test suite to ensure we're protected against such a regression in GHC.