14 KiB
Heftia: higher-order effects done right for Haskell
Heftia is a higher-order effects version of Freer.
This library provides "continuation-based semantics" for higher-order effects, the same as lexi-lambda's eff.
Instead of using the IO
monad to implement delimited continuations for effects, Heftia internally uses Freer
monad.
The paper
- Casper Bach Poulsen and Cas van der Rest. 2023. Hefty Algebras: Modular Elaboration of Higher-Order Algebraic Effects. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 7, POPL, Article 62 (January 2023), 31 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3571255
inspires this library. Hefty trees, proposed by the above paper, are extensions of free monads, allowing for a straightforward treatment of higher-order effects.
This library offers Hefty monads and Freer monads, encoded into data types in several ways to enable tuning in pursuit of high performance.
Status
This library is currently in the beta stage. There may be significant changes and potential bugs.
We are looking forward to your feedback!
Installation
-
$ cabal update
-
Add
heftia-effects ^>= 0.2
andghc-typelits-knownnat ^>= 0.7
to the build dependencies. Enable the ghc-typelits-knownnat plugin,GHC2021
, and the following language extensions as needed:LambdaCase
DerivingStrategies
DataKinds
TypeFamilies
BlockArguments
FunctionalDependencies
RecordWildCards
DefaultSignatures
PatternSynonyms
Example .cabal:
...
build-depends:
...
heftia-effects ^>= 0.2,
ghc-typelits-knownnat ^>= 0.7,
default-language: GHC2021
default-extensions:
...
LambdaCase,
DerivingStrategies,
DataKinds,
TypeFamilies,
BlockArguments,
FunctionalDependencies,
RecordWildCards,
DefaultSignatures,
PatternSynonyms,
TemplateHaskell,
PartialTypeSignatures,
AllowAmbiguousTypes
ghc-options: ... -fplugin GHC.TypeLits.KnownNat.Solver
...
This library has been tested to work with GHC 9.2.8.
Getting Started
To run the SemanticsZoo example:
$ git clone https://github.com/sayo-hs/heftia
$ cd heftia/heftia-effects
$ cabal run exe:SemanticsZoo
...
# State + Except
( evalState . runThrow . runCatch $ action ) = Right True
( runThrow . evalState . runCatch $ action ) = Right True
# NonDet + Except
( runNonDet . runThrow . runCatch . runChooseH $ action1 ) = [Right True,Right False]
( runThrow . runNonDet . runCatch . runChooseH $ action1 ) = Right [True,False]
( runNonDet . runThrow . runCatch . runChooseH $ action2 ) = [Right False,Right True]
( runThrow . runNonDet . runCatch . runChooseH $ action2 ) = Right [False,True]
# NonDet + Writer
( runNonDet . runTell . elaborateWriter . runChooseH $ action ) = [(3,(3,True)),(4,(4,False))]
( runTell . runNonDet . elaborateWriter . runChooseH $ action ) = (6,[(3,True),(4,False)])
[Note] All other permutations will cause type errors.
$
Example
Compared to existing Effect System libraries in Haskell that handle higher-order effects, this library's approach allows for a more effortless and flexible handling of higher-order effects. Here are some examples:
Extracting Multi-shot Delimited Continuations
In handling higher-order effects, it's easy to work with multi-shot delimited continuations. This enables an almost complete emulation of "Algebraic Effects and Handlers". For more details, please refer to the example code.
Two interpretations of the censor
effect for Writer
Let's consider the following Writer effectful program:
hello :: (Tell String <: m, Monad m) => m ()
hello = do
tell "Hello"
tell " world!"
censorHello :: (Tell String <: m, WriterH String <<: m, Monad m) => m ()
censorHello =
censor
( \s ->
if s == "Hello" then
"Goodbye"
else if s == "Hello world!" then
"Hello world!!"
else
s
)
hello
For censorHello
, should the final written string be "Goodbye world!"
(Pre-applying behavior) ?
Or should it be "Hello world!!"
(Post-applying behavior) ?
With Heftia, you can freely choose either behavior depending on which higher-order effect interpreter (which we call an elaborator) you use.
main :: IO ()
main = runEff do
(sPre, _) <-
runTell
. interpretRecH (elabWriterPre @String)
$ censorHello
(sPost, _) <-
runTell
. interpretRecH (elabWriterPost @String)
$ censorHello
liftIO $ putStrLn $ "Pre-applying: " <> sPre
liftIO $ putStrLn $ "Post-applying: " <> sPost
Using the elabWriterPre
elaborator, you'll get "Goodbye world!", whereas with the elabWriterPost
elaborator, you'll get "Hello world!!".
Pre-applying: Goodbye world!
Post-applying: Hello world!!
For more details, please refer to the complete code and the implementation of the elaborator.
Furthermore, the structure of Heftia is theoretically straightforward, with ad-hoc elements being eliminated.
Additionally, Heftia supports not only monadic effectful programs but also applicative effectful programs. This may be useful when writing concurrent effectful code.
Heftia is the current main focus of the Sayo Project.
Documentation
The example codes are located in the heftia-effects/Example/ directory. Also, the following HeftWorld example: https://github.com/sayo-hs/HeftWorld
Examples with explanations can be found in the docs/examples/ directory. Documents have become outdated.
Please wait for the documentation for the new version to be written.
Limitation and how to avoid it
The reset behavior of the scopes held by unhandled higher-order effects
When attempting to interpret an effect while there are unhandled higher-order effects present, you cannot obtain delimited continuations beyond the action scope held by these unhandled higher-order effects. It appears as if a reset (in the sense of shift/reset) is applied to each of the scopes still held by the remaining unhandled higher-order effects.
In other words, to obtain delimited continuations beyond their scope, it is necessary to first handle and eliminate all higher-order effects that hold those scopes,
and then handle the effect targeted for stateful interpretation in that order.
For this purpose, it might sometimes be possible to use multi-layering. For an example of multi-layering,
see handleReaderThenShift
defined in Example/Continuation2
(particularly, the type signature of prog
within it).
For more details, please refer to the documentation of the interpretRec
family of functions.
Comparison
- Higher-Order Effects: Does it support higher-order effects?
- Delimited Continuation: The ability to manipulate delimited continuations.
- Effect System: For a term representing an effectful program, is it possible to statically decidable a type that enumerates all the effects the program may produce?
- Purely Monadic: Is an effectful program represented as a transparent data structure that is a monad, and can it be interpreted into other data types using only pure operations without side effects or
unsafePerformIO
? - Dynamic Effect Rewriting: Can an effectful program have its internal effects altered afterwards (by functions typically referred to as
handle with
,intercept
,interpose
,transform
,translate
, orrewrite
) ? - Performance: Time complexity or space complexity.
Library or Language | Higher-Order Effects | Delimited Continuation | Effect System | Purely Monadic | Dynamic Effect Rewriting | Performance (TODO) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Heftia | Yes 1 | Multi-shot | Yes | Yes (also Applicative and others) | Yes | ? |
freer-simple | No | Multi-shot | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? |
Polysemy | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? |
Effectful | Yes | No | Yes | No (based on the IO monad) |
Yes | ? |
eff | Yes | Multi-shot? | Yes | No (based on the IO monad) |
Yes | Fast |
mtl | Yes | Multi-shot (ContT ) |
Yes | Yes | No | ? |
fused-effects | Yes | No? | Yes | Yes | No | ? |
koka-lang | No 2 | Multi-shot | Yes | No (language built-in) | Yes | ? |
OCaml-lang 5 | ? | One-shot | No 3 | No (language built-in) | ? | ? |
Heftia can simply be described as a higher-order version of freer-simple. This is indeed true in terms of its internal mechanisms as well.
Compatibility with other libraries
Representation of effects
-
Heftia Effects relies on data-effects for the definitions of standard effects such as
Reader
,Writer
, andState
. -
It is generally recommended to use effects defined with automatic derivation provided by data-effects-th.
-
The representation of first-order effects is compatible with freer-simple. Therefore, effects defined for freer-simple can be used as is in this library. However, to avoid confusion between redundantly defined effects, it is recommended to use the effects defined in data-effects.
-
GADTs for higher-order effects need to be instances of the HFunctor type class for convenient usage. While it is still possible to use them without being instances of
HFunctor
, theinterpretRec
family of functions cannot be used when higher-order effects that are notHFunctor
are unhandled. If this issue is not a concern, the GADT representation of higher-order effects is compatible with Polysemy and fused-effects. It is not compatible with Effectful and eff.
About mtl
-
Since the representation of effectful programs in Heftia is simply a monad (
Eff
), it can be used as the base monad for transformers. This means you can stack any transformer on top of it. -
The
Eff
monad is an instance ofMonadIO
,MonadError
,MonadRWS
, etc., and these behave as the senders for the embeddedIO
or the effect GADTs defined in data-effects.
Future Plans
-
Enriching the documentation and tests
-
Completing missing definitions such as
- more patterns of interpret & transform function-families.
- handlers for the
Accum
and others effect classes
and others.
-
Benchmarking
License
The license is MPL 2.0. Please refer to the NOTICE.
Additionally, this README.md and the documents under the docs
/docs-ja
directory are licensed
under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Your contributions are welcome!
Please see CONTRIBUTING.md.
Credits
Parts of this project have been inspired by the following resources:
- Hefty Algebras -- The Artifact
- Copyright (c) 2023 Casper Bach Poulsen and Cas van der Rest
- License: MIT
-
limitation: https://github.com/sayo-hs/heftia?tab=readme-ov-file#the-reset-behavior-of-the-scopes-held-by-unhandled-higher-order-effects ↩︎
-
https://gist.github.com/ymdryo/6fb2f7f4020c6fcda98ccc67c090dc75 ↩︎
-
Effects do not appear in the type signature and can potentially cause unhandled errors at runtime ↩︎