Typeclasses

We don't use the regular Control.Concurrent and Control.Exception modules, we use typeclass-generalised ones instead from the concurrency and exceptions packages.

Porting guide

If you want to test some existing code, you'll need to port it to the appropriate typeclass. The typeclass is necessary, because we can't peek inside IO and STM values, so we need to able to plug in an alternative implementation when testing.

Fortunately, this tends to be a fairly mechanical and type-driven process:

1. Import Control.Concurrent.Classy.* instead of Control.Concurrent.*

2. Import Control.Monad.Catch instead of Control.Exception

3. Change your monad type:

   • IO a becomes MonadConc m => m a
   • STM a becomes MonadSTM stm => stm a

4. Parameterise your state types by the monad:

   • TVar becomes TVar stm
   • MVar becomes MVar m
   • IORef becomes IORef m

5. Some functions are renamed:

   • forkIO* becomes fork*
   • atomicModifyIORefCAS becomes modifyIORefCAS*

6. Fix the type errors

If you're lucky enough to be starting a new concurrent Haskell project, you can just program against the MonadConc interface.

What if I really need I/O?

You can use MonadIO and liftIO with MonadConc, for instance if you need to talk to a database (or just use some existing library which needs real I/O).

To test IO-using code, there are some rules you need to follow:

1. Given the same set of scheduling decisions, your IO code must be deterministic (see below).

2. As dejafu can't inspect IO values, they should be kept small; otherwise dejafu may miss buggy interleavings.

3. You absolutely cannot block on the action of another thread inside IO, or the test execution will just deadlock.

Deriving your own instances

There are MonadConc and MonadSTM instances for many common monad transformers. In the simple case, where you want an instance for a newtype wrapper around a type that has an instance, you may be able to derive it. For example:

{-# LANGUAGE GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving #-}
{-# LANGUAGE StandaloneDeriving #-}
{-# LANGUAGE UndecidableInstances #-}

data Env = Env

newtype MyMonad m a = MyMonad { runMyMonad :: ReaderT Env m a }
  deriving (Functor, Applicative, Monad)

deriving instance MonadThrow m => MonadThrow (MyMonad m)
deriving instance MonadCatch m => MonadCatch (MyMonad m)
deriving instance MonadMask  m => MonadMask  (MyMonad m)

deriving instance MonadConc m => MonadConc (MyMonad m)

MonadSTM needs a slightly different set of classes:

{-# LANGUAGE GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving #-}
{-# LANGUAGE StandaloneDeriving #-}
{-# LANGUAGE UndecidableInstances #-}

data Env = Env

newtype MyMonad m a = MyMonad { runMyMonad :: ReaderT Env m a }
  deriving (Functor, Applicative, Monad, Alternative, MonadPlus)

deriving instance MonadThrow m => MonadThrow (MyMonad m)
deriving instance MonadCatch m => MonadCatch (MyMonad m)

deriving instance MonadSTM m => MonadSTM (MyMonad m)

Don't be put off by the use of UndecidableInstances, it's safe here.