dejafu/doc/getting_started.rst

Getting Started
===============

    [Déjà Fu is] A martial art in which the user's limbs move in time
    as well as space, […] It is best described as "the feeling that
    you have been kicked in the head this way before"

    **Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time**

Déjà Fu is a unit-testing library for concurrent Haskell programs.
Tests are deterministic and expressive, making it easy and convenient
to test your threaded code.  Available on GitHub_, Hackage_, and
Stackage_.

.. _GitHub:   https://github.com/barrucadu/dejafu
.. _Hackage:  https://hackage.haskell.org/package/dejafu
.. _Stackage: https://www.stackage.org/package/dejafu

Features:

* An abstraction over the concurrency functionality in ``IO``
* Deterministic testing of nondeterministic code
* Both complete (slower) and incomplete (faster) modes
* A unit-testing-like approach to writing test cases
* A property-testing-like approach to comparing stateful operations
* Testing of potentially nonterminating programs
* Integration with HUnit_ and tasty_

.. _HUnit: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/HUnit
.. _Tasty: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/tasty


There are a few different packages under the Déjà Fu umbrella:

.. csv-table::
   :header: "Package", "Version", "Summary"

   "concurrency_",  "1.3.0.0", "Typeclasses, functions, and data types for concurrency and STM"
   "dejafu_",       "1.0.0.0", "Systematic testing for Haskell concurrency"
   "hunit-dejafu_", "1.0.0.0", "Déjà Fu support for the HUnit test framework"
   "tasty-dejafu_", "1.0.0.0", "Déjà Fu support for the tasty test framework"

.. _concurrency:  https://hackage.haskell.org/package/concurrency
.. _dejafu:       https://hackage.haskell.org/package/dejafu
.. _hunit-dejafu: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hunit-dejafu
.. _tasty-dejafu: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/tasty-dejafu

Everything is on Hackage and Stackage, and the last three major GHC
versions (currently 8.2, 8.0, and 7.10) are supported.


Installation
------------

Install from Hackage globally:

.. code-block:: none

  $ cabal install dejafu

Or add it to your cabal file:

.. code-block:: none

  build-depends: ...
               , dejafu

Or to your package.yaml:

.. code-block:: none

  dependencies:
    ...
    - dejafu


Quick start guide
-----------------

Déjà Fu supports unit testing, and comes with a helper function
called ``autocheck`` to look for some common issues.  Let's see it in
action:

.. code-block:: haskell

  import Control.Concurrent.Classy

  myFunction :: MonadConc m => m String
  myFunction = do
    var <- newEmptyMVar
    fork (putMVar var "hello")
    fork (putMVar var "world")
    readMVar var

That ``MonadConc`` is a typeclass abstraction over concurrency, but
we'll get onto that shortly.  First, the result of testing:

.. code-block:: none

  > autocheck myFunction
  [pass] Never Deadlocks
  [pass] No Exceptions
  [fail] Consistent Result
          "hello" S0----S1--S0--

          "world" S0----S2--S0--
  False

There are no deadlocks or uncaught exceptions, which is good; but the
program is (as you probably spotted) nondeterministic!

Along with each result, Déjà Fu gives us a representative execution
trace in an abbreviated form.  ``Sn`` means that thread ``n`` started
executing, and ``Pn`` means that thread ``n`` pre-empted the
previously running thread.


Why Déjà Fu?
------------

Testing concurrent programs is difficult, because in general they are
nondeterministic.  This leads to people using work-arounds like
running their testsuite many thousands of times; or running their
testsuite while putting their machine under heavy load.

These approaches are inadequate for a few reasons:

* **How many runs is enough?** When you are just hopping to spot a bug
  by coincidence, how do you know to stop?
* **How do you know if you've fixed a bug you saw previously?**
  Because the scheduler is a black box, you don't know if the
  previously buggy schedule has been re-run.
* **You won't actually get that much scheduling variety!** Operating
  systems and language runtimes like to run threads for long periods
  of time, which reduces the variety you get (and so drives up the
  number of runs you need).

Déjà Fu addresses these points by offering *complete* testing.  You
can run a test case and be guaranteed to find all results with some
bounds.  These bounds can be configured, or even disabled!  The
underlying approach used is smarter than merely trying all possible
executions, and will in general explore the state-space quickly.

If your test case is just too big for complete testing, there is also
a random scheduling mode, which is necessarily *incomplete*.  However,
Déjà Fu will tend to produce much more schedule variety than just
running your test case in ``IO`` the same number of times, and so bugs
will tend to crop up sooner.  Furthermore, as you get execution traces
out, you can be certain that a bug has been fixed by simply following
the trace by eye.

**If you'd like to get involved with Déjà Fu**, check out `the
"good first issue" label on the issue tracker`__.

.. __: https://github.com/barrucadu/dejafu/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22


Questions, feedback, discussion
-------------------------------

* For general help talk to me in IRC (barrucadu in #haskell) or shoot
  me an email (mike@barrucadu.co.uk)
* For bugs, issues, or requests, please `file an issue`__.

.. __:  https://github.com/barrucadu/dejafu/issues


Bibliography
------------

Déjà Fu has been produced as part of my Ph.D work, and wouldn't be
possible without prior research.  Here are the core papers:

* Bounded partial-order reduction, K. Coons, M. Musuvathi,
  and K. McKinley (2013)
* Dynamic Partial Order Reduction for Relaxed Memory
  Models, N. Zhang, M. Kusano, and C. Wang (2015)
* Concurrency Testing Using Schedule Bounding: an Empirical
  Study, P. Thompson, A. Donaldson, and A. Betts (2014)
* On the Verification of Programs on Relaxed Memory
  Models, A. Linden (2014)