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!)
I'm playing with some linear structures and finding these useful a lot,
so good to have a consistent syntax for it. '#' is chosen because it's
short, looks a bit like a cross if you look at it from the right angle
(!) and so as not to clash with '@@' in preorder reasoning syntax.
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.
Including appropriate casts, and Num/Eq/Ord/Show implementations.
Also includes new primitives in Data.Buffer, and calls to foreign
functions in C as 'unsigned'.
Still a couple of things to resolve in coverage and totality checking
before we can switch on %default, so don't expect quite the right
behaviour just yet. More progress though!
Also working on this has caught a few totality errors in the Idris 2
code base that Idris 1 missed... so these are fixed on the way.