Announcing: the new unliftio library

For the past few years, Francesco Mazzoli and I have discussed issues around monad transformers—and the need to run their actions in IO—on a fairly regular basis. I wrote the monad-unlift library a while ago to try and address these concerns. But recent work I did in Stack on the extensible snapshots branch demonstrated some of the shortcomings Francesco had mentioned to me. This is also in line with conclusions I was reaching from code review and training I’ve been doing, as I’ve mentioned recently.

Putting that all together: last week we finally bit the bullet and put together a new pair of libraries:

• unliftio-core defines the MonadUnliftIO typeclass, provides instances for base and transformers, and provides a few helper functions, with no additional dependencies.
• unliftio provides a “batteries included” set of unlifted functions for exceptions, timeouts, async, and more

This should be considered an experimental release, with some changes already planned. Instead of repeating myself, I’m going to copy in the README from unliftio for the remainder of this post, which includes more details on using these libraries, comparison with alternatives, and plans for future changes.

NOTE If you’re reading this in the future, please check out the README from the packages themselves in the links above. The content below will not be updated with changes to the libraries.

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unliftio

Provides the core MonadUnliftIO typeclass, a number of common instances, and a collection of common functions working with it. Not sure what the MonadUnliftIO typeclass is all about? Read on!

NOTE This library is young, and will likely undergo some serious changes over time. It’s also very lightly tested. That said: the core concept of MonadUnliftIO has been refined for years and is pretty solid, and even though the code here is lightly tested, the vast majority of it is simply apply withUnliftIO to existing functionality. Caveat emptor and all that.

Quickstart

• Replace imports like Control.Exception with UnliftIO.Exception. Yay, your catch and finally are more powerful and safer!
• Similar with Control.Concurrent.Async with UnliftIO.Async
• Or go all in and import UnliftIO
• Naming conflicts: let unliftio win
• Drop the deps on monad-control, lifted-base, and exceptions
• Compilation failures? You may have just avoided subtle runtime bugs

Sound like magic? It’s not. Keep reading!

Unlifting in 2 minutes

Let’s say I have a function:

readFile :: FilePath -> IO ByteString

But I’m writing code inside a function that uses ReaderT Env IO, not just plain IO. How can I call my readFile function in that context? One way is to manually unwrap the ReaderT data constructor:

myReadFile :: FilePath -> ReaderT Env IO ByteString
myReadFile fp = ReaderT $ _env -> readFile fp

But having to do this regularly is tedious, and ties our code to a specific monad transformer stack. Instead, many of us would use MonadIO:

myReadFile :: MonadIO m => FilePath -> m ByteString
myReadFile = liftIO . readFile

But now let’s play with a different function:

withBinaryFile :: FilePath -> IOMode -> (Handle -> IO a) -> IO a

We want a function with signature:

myWithBinaryFile
    :: FilePath
    -> IOMode
    -> (Handle -> ReaderT Env IO a)
    -> ReaderT Env IO a

If I squint hard enough, I can accomplish this directly with the ReaderT constructor via:

myWithBinaryFile fp mode inner =
  ReaderT $ env -> withBinaryFile
    fp
    mode
    (h -> runReaderT (inner h) env)

I dare you to try to and accomplish this with MonadIO and liftIO. It simply can’t be done. (If you’re looking for the technical reason, it’s because IO appears in negative/argument position in withBinaryFile.)

However, with MonadUnliftIO, this is possible:

import Control.Monad.IO.Unlift

myWithBinaryFile
    :: MonadUnliftIO m
    => FilePath
    -> IOMode
    -> (Handle -> m a)
    -> m a
myWithBinaryFile fp mode inner =
  withRunInIO $ runInIO ->
  withBinaryFile
    fp
    mode
    (h -> runInIO (inner h))

That’s it, you now know the entire basis of this library.

How common is this problem?

This pops up in a number of places. Some examples:

• Proper exception handling, with functions like bracket, catch, and finally
• Working with MVars via modifyMVar and similar
• Using the timeout function
• Installing callback handlers (e.g., do you want to do logging in a signal handler?).

This also pops up when working with libraries which are monomorphic on IO, even if they could be written more extensibly.

Examples

Reading through the codebase here is likely the best example to see how to use MonadUnliftIO in practice. And for many cases, you can simply add the MonadUnliftIO constraint and then use the pre-unlifted versions of functions (like UnliftIO.Exception.catch). But ultimately, you’ll probably want to use the typeclass directly. The type class has only one method — askUnliftIO:

newtype UnliftIO m = UnliftIO { unliftIO :: forall a. m a -> IO a }

class MonadIO m => MonadUnliftIO m where
  askUnliftIO :: m (UnliftIO m)

askUnliftIO gives us a function to run arbitrary computation in m in IO. Thus the “unlift”: it’s like liftIO, but the other way around.

Here are some sample typeclass instances:

instance MonadUnliftIO IO where
  askUnliftIO = return (UnliftIO id)
instance MonadUnliftIO m => MonadUnliftIO (IdentityT m) where
  askUnliftIO = IdentityT $
                withUnliftIO $ u ->
                return (UnliftIO (unliftIO u . runIdentityT))
instance MonadUnliftIO m => MonadUnliftIO (ReaderT r m) where
  askUnliftIO = ReaderT $ r ->
                withUnliftIO $ u ->
                return (UnliftIO (unliftIO u . flip runReaderT r))

Note that:

• The IO instance does not actually do any lifting or unlifting, and therefore it can use id
• IdentityT is essentially just wrapping/unwrapping its data constructor, and then recursively calling withUnliftIO on the underlying monad.
• ReaderT is just like IdentityT, but it captures the reader environment when starting.

We can use askUnliftIO to unlift a function:

timeout :: MonadUnliftIO m => Int -> m a -> m (Maybe a)
timeout x y = do
  u <- askUnliftIO
  System.Timeout.timeout x $ unliftIO u y

or more concisely using withRunIO:

timeout :: MonadUnliftIO m => Int -> m a -> m (Maybe a)
timeout x y = withRunInIO $ run -> System.Timeout.timeout x $ run y

This is a common pattern: use withRunInIO to capture a run function, and then call the original function with the user-supplied arguments, applying run as necessary. withRunIO takes care of invoking unliftIO for us.

However, if we want to use the run function with different types, we must use askUnliftIO:

race :: MonadUnliftIO m => m a -> m b -> m (Either a b)
race a b = do
  u <- askUnliftIO
  liftIO (A.race (unliftIO u a) (unliftIO u b))

or more idiomatically withUnliftIO:

race :: MonadUnliftIO m => m a -> m b -> m (Either a b)
race a b = withUnliftIO $ u -> A.race (unliftIO u a) (unliftIO u b)

This works just like withRunIO, except we use unliftIO u instead of run, which is polymorphic. You could get away with multiple withRunInIO calls here instead, but this approach is idiomatic and may be more performant (depending on optimizations).

And finally, a more complex usage, when unlifting the mask function. This function needs to unlift vaues to be passed into the restore function, and then liftIO the result of the restore function.

mask :: MonadUnliftIO m => ((forall a. m a -> m a) -> m b) -> m b
mask f = withUnliftIO $ u -> Control.Exception.mask $ unmask ->
  unliftIO u $ f $ liftIO . unmask . unliftIO u

Limitations

Not all monads which can be an instance of MonadIO can be instances of MonadUnliftIO, due to the MonadUnliftIO laws (described in the Haddocks for the typeclass). This prevents instances for a number of classes of transformers:

• Transformers using continuations (e.g., ContT, ConduitM, Pipe)
• Transformers with some monadic state (e.g., StateT, WriterT)
• Transformers with multiple exit points (e.g., ExceptT and its ilk)

In fact, there are two specific classes of transformers that this approach does work for:

• Transformers with no context at all (e.g., IdentityT, NoLoggingT)
• Transformers with a context but no state (e.g., ReaderT, LoggingT)

This may sound restrictive, but this restriction is fully intentional. Trying to unlift actions in stateful monads leads to unpredictable behavior. For a long and exhaustive example of this, see A Tale of Two Brackets, which was a large motivation for writing this library.

Comparison to other approaches

You may be thinking “Haven’t I seen a way to do catch in StateT?” You almost certainly have. Let’s compare this approach with alternatives. (For an older but more thorough rundown of the options, see Exceptions and monad transformers.)

There are really two approaches to this problem:

• Use a set of typeclasses for the specific functionality we care about. This is the approach taken by the exceptions package with MonadThrow, MonadCatch, and MonadMask. (Earlier approaches include MonadCatchIO-mtl and MonadCatchIO-transformers.)
• Define a generic typeclass that allows any control structure to be unlifted. This is the approach taken by the monad-control package. (Earlier approaches include monad-peel and neither.)

The first style gives extra functionality in allowing instances that have nothing to do with runtime exceptions (e.g., a MonadCatch instance for Either). This is arguably a good thing. The second style gives extra functionality in allowing more operations to be unlifted (like threading primitives, not supported by the exceptions package).

Another distinction within the generic typeclass family is whether we unlift to just IO, or to arbitrary base monads. For those familiar, this is the distinction between the MonadIO and MonadBase typeclasses.

This package’s main objection to all of the above approaches is that they work for too many monads, and provide difficult-to-predict behavior for a number of them (arguably: plain wrong behavior). For example, in lifted-base (built on top of monad-control), the finally operation will discard mutated state coming from the cleanup action, which is usually not what people expect. exceptions has different behavior here, which is arguably better. But we’re arguing here that we should disallow all such ambiguity at the type level.

So comparing to other approaches:

monad-unlift

Throwing this one out there now: the monad-unlift library is built on top of monad-control, and uses fairly sophisticated type level features to restrict it to only the safe subset of monads. The same approach is taken by Control.Concurrent.Async.Lifted.Safe in the lifted-async package. Two problems with this:

• The complicated type level functionality can confuse GHC in some cases, making it difficult to get code to compile.
• We don’t have an ecosystem of functions like lifted-base built on top of it, making it likely people will revert to the less safe cousin functions.

monad-control

The main contention until now is that unlifting in a transformer like StateT is unsafe. This is not universally true: if only one action is being unlifted, no ambiguity exists. So, for example, try :: IO a -> IO (Either e a) can safely be unlifted in StateT, while finally :: IO a -> IO b -> IO a cannot.

monad-control allows us to unlift both styles. In theory, we could write a variant of lifted-base that never does state discards, and let try be more general than finally. In other words, this is an advantage of monad-control over MonadUnliftIO. We’ve avoided providing any such extra typeclass in this package though, for two reasons:

• MonadUnliftIO is a simple typeclass, easy to explain. We don’t want to complicated matters (MonadBaseControl is a notoriously difficult to understand typeclass). This simplicity is captured by the laws for MonadUnliftIO, which make the behavior of the run functions close to that of the already familiar lift and liftIO.
• Having this kind of split would be confusing in user code, when suddenly finally is not available to us. We would rather encourage good practices from the beginning.

Another distinction is that monad-control uses the MonadBase style, allowing unlifting to arbitrary base monads. In this package, we’ve elected to go with MonadIO style. This limits what we can do (e.g., no unlifting to STM), but we went this way because:

• In practice, we’ve found that the vast majority of cases are dealing with IO
• The split in the ecosystem between constraints like MonadBase IO and MonadIO leads to significant confusion, and MonadIO is by far the more common constraints (with the typeclass existing in base)

exceptions

One thing we lose by leaving the exceptions approach is the ability to model both pure and side-effecting (via IO) monads with a single paradigm. For example, it can be pretty convenient to have MonadThrow constraints for parsing functions, which will either return an Either value or throw a runtime exception. That said, there are detractors of that approach:

• You lose type information about which exception was thrown
• There is ambiguity about how the exception was returned in a constraint like (MonadIO m, MonadThrow m)

The latter could be addressed by defining a law such as throwM = liftIO . throwIO. However, we’ve decided in this library to go the route of encouraging Either return values for pure functions, and using runtime exceptions in IO otherwise. (You’re of course free to also return IO (Either e a).)

By losing MonadCatch, we lose the ability to define a generic way to catch exceptions in continuation based monads (such as ConduitM). Our argument here is that those monads can freely provide their own catching functions. And in practice, long before the MonadCatch typeclass existed, conduit provided a catchC function.

In exchange for the MonadThrow typeclass, we provide helper functions to convert Either values to runtime exceptions in this package. And the MonadMask typeclass is now replaced fully by MonadUnliftIO, which like the monad-control case limits which monads we can be working with.

Async exception safety

The safe-exceptions package builds on top of the exceptions package and provides intelligent behavior for dealing with asynchronous exceptions, a common pitfall. This library provides a set of exception handling functions with the same async exception behavior as that library. You can consider this library a drop-in replacement for safe-exceptions. In the future, we may reimplement safe-exceptions to use MonadUnliftIO instead of MonadCatch and MonadMask.

Package split

The unliftio-core package provides just the typeclass with minimal dependencies (just base and transformers). If you’re writing a library, we recommend depending on that package to provide your instances. The unliftio package is a “batteries loaded” library providing a plethora of pre-unlifted helper functions. It’s a good choice for importing, or even for use in a custom prelude.

Orphans

The unliftio package currently provides orphan instances for types from the resourcet and monad-logger packages. This is not intended as a long-term solution; once unliftio is deemed more stable, the plan is to move those instances into the respective libraries and remove the dependency on them here.

If there are other temporary orphans that should be added, please bring it up in the issue tracker or send a PR, but we’ll need to be selective about adding dependencies.

Future questions

• Should we extend the set of functions exposed in UnliftIO.IO to include things like hSeek?
• Are there other libraries that deserve to be unlifted here?

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