IO Monad Class Hierarchy: io-classes package

This package provides a monad class hierarchy which is an interface for both the io-sim and IO monads. It was developed with the following constraints in mind:

  • be a drop-in replacement for IO monad;
  • IO instances do not alter its original semantics, providing a shallow bindings to async, base, stm, and exceptions packages as well as timer API;
  • provide zero-cost abstractions.

We provide also non-standard extensions of this API in sublibraries:

io-classes:strict-stm and nothunks were successfully used in a large code base to eliminate space leaks and keep that property over long development cycles.

Documentation

Hackage doesn't yet support public sublibraries, thus Haddocks are published here.

Support material

Exception Class Hierarchy

This package provides an alternative class hierarchy giving access to exceptions API. The [exception] package class hierarchy is also supported by io-sim, so you can also use either one.

The MonadThrow defined in this package allows working with exceptions without having explicit access to catch or mask. It only provides access to throwIO, bracket, bracket_, and finally. MonadCatch class provides API which allows working with exceptions, e.g. catch or bracketOnError, and MonadMask gives access to low-level mask and friends. This division makes code review process somewhat easier. Using only MonadThrow constraint, the reviewer can be sure that no low-level exception API is used, which usually requires more care. Still MonadThrow is general enough to do resource handling right.

Time and Timer APIs

The time and timer APIs of this package follows closely the API exposed by base and time packages. We separately packaged a more convenient API in si-timers (ref SI), which provides a monoidal action of DiffTime on monotonic time as well as exposes 32-bit safe timer API (on 32-bit systems time in microseconds represented as an Int can only hold timeouts of ~35 minutes).

si-timers sublibrary provides cancellable timers API, see registerDelayCancellable.

Control.Monad.Class.MonadTimer.NonStandard.MonadTimeout provides a low-level timeout abstraction. On systems that support a native timer manager, it's used to implement its API, which is very efficient even for low-latency timeouts. On other platforms (e.g. Windows), it's good enough for subsecond timeouts but it's not good enough for fine-grained timeouts (e.g. sub milliseconds) as it relays on the GHC thread scheduler. We support MonadTimeout on Linux, MacOS, Windows, and IOSim (and unofficially on GHCJS).

MonadDelay and MonadTimer classes provide a well-established interface to delays & timers.

Software Transactional Memory API

We provide two interfaces to stm API: lazy, included in io-classes; and strict one provided by io-classes:strict-stm.

Threads API

We draw a line between base API and async API. The former is provided by MonadFork the latter by MonadAsync Both are shallow abstractions around APIs exposed by the base and async packages.

MVar API

We also provide lazy and strict MVars:

Some other APIs

Monad Transformers

We provide support for monad transformers, see io-classes:mtl sublibrary. Although at this stage it might have its limitations and so there might be some rough edges. PRs are welcomed, contributing.

Differences from base, async, or exceptions packages

Major differences

  • getMonotonicTime returns Time (a newtype wrapper around DiffTime)
  • Deadlock exceptions are not thrown to the main thread (see ref), so they cannot be caught. This was a design decision, which allows to catch all deadlocks which otherwise could be captured by a catch.

Minor differences

Some of the types have more general kind signatures, e.g.

type Async :: (Type -> Type) -> Type -> Type

The first type of kind Type -> Type describes the monad which could be instantiated to IO, IOSim or some other monad stacks built with monad transformers. The same applies to many other types, e.g. TVar, TMVar.

The following types although similar to the originals are not the same as the ones that come from base, async, or exceptions packages:

  • Handler (origin: base)
  • MaskingState (origin: base)
  • Concurrently (origin: async)
  • ExceptionInLinkedThread (origin: async): io-classes version does not store Async
  • ExitCase (origin: exceptions)

Debuging & Insepction

We provide quite extended debugging & inspection API. This proved to be extremely helpful when analysing complex deadlocks or livelocks or writing complex quickcheck properties of a highly concurrent system. Some of this is only possible because we can control the execution environment of io-sim.

  • labelThread as part of MonadThread (IO, io-sim, which is also part of GHC API, ref labelThread);
  • MonadLabelledSTM which allows to label of various STM mutable variables, e.g. TVar, MVar, etc. (io-sim, not provided by GHC);
  • MonadInspectSTM which allows inspecting values of STM mutable variables when they are committed. (io-sim, not provided by GHC).

IO Simulator Monad: io-sim package

A pure simulator monad built on top of the lazy ST monad which supports:

  • optional dynamic race discovery and schedule exploration (see IOSimPOR)
  • synchronous and asynchronous exceptions; including: throwing, catching and masking synchronous and asynchronous exceptions;
  • concurrency (using simulated threads), with interfaces shaped by the base and async libraries;
  • software transactional memory (STM);
  • simulated time;
  • timeouts;
  • dynamically typed traces and event log tracing;
  • lifting any ST computations;
  • inspection of STM mutable data structures;
  • deadlock detection;
  • MonadFix instances for both IOSim and its corresponding STM monad.

io-sim together with io-classes is a drop-in replacement for the IO monad (with some ramifications). It was designed to write easily testable Haskell code (including simulating socket programming or disk IO). Using io-classes and si-timers libraries one can write code that can run in both: the real IO and the IOSim monad provided by this package. One of the design goals was to keep the API as close as possible to base, exceptions, async, and stm packages.

io-sim package also provides two interpreters, a standard one and IOSimPOR which supports dynamic discovery of race conditions and schedule exploration with partial order reduction.

io-sim provides API to explore traces produced by a simulation. It can contain arbitrary Haskell terms, a feature that is very useful to build property-based tests using QuickCheck.

The package contains thorough tests, including tests of STM against the original specification (as described in Composable Memory Transactions and its GHC implementation. This can be seen in both ways: as a check that our implementation matches the specification and the GHC implementation, but also the other way around: that GHCs STM implementation meets the specification.

Supporting material

Packages

io-classes:mtl-1.8.0.1

io-classes:si-timers-1.8.0.1

io-classes:strict-mvar-1.8.0.1

io-classes:testlib-1.8.0.1

io-sim-1.8.0.1