Following a fairly detailed discussion on slack, the feeling is
generally that it's better to have a single interface. While precision
is nice, it doesn't appear to buy us anything here. If that turns out to
be wrong, or limiting somehow, we can revisit it later. Also:
- it's easier for backend authors if the type of IO operations is
slightly less restrictive. For example, if it's in HasIO, that limits
alternative implementations, which might be awkward for some
alternative back ends.
- it's one less extra detail to learn. This is minor, but there needs to
be a clear advantage if there's more detail to learn.
- It is difficult to think of an underlying type that can't have a Monad
instance (I have personally never encountered one - if they turns out
to exist, again, we can revisit!)
This involves new primitives GCPtr and GCAnyPtr which are pointer types
that have finalisers attached. The finalisers are run when the
associated pointer goes out of scope.
In the test, I am assuming that the GC will only be called once, right
at the end. Otherwise, the output isn't guaranteed to be deterministic!
Let's see how this assumption holds...
This is currently Chez only. I think it'll be easy enough to add to
the Racket and Gambit back ends too.
