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io-sim

IOSim is an simulator monad which supports:

  • asynchronous exceptions
  • simulated time
  • timeout API
  • software transaction memory (STM)
  • concurrency: both low level forkIO as well as async style
  • strict STM
  • access to lazy ST
  • schedule discovery (see IOSimPOR)
  • eventlog
  • dynamic tracing
  • tracing committed changes to TVar, TMVars, etc.
  • labelling of threads, TVar's, etc.

io-classes provides an interface, which allows to write code which can be run in both real IO and IOSim. It is a drop-in replacement for IO, and supports interfaces commonly known from base, exceptions, stm, async or time packages.

One of the principles of io-classes was to stay as close to IO as possible, thus most of the IO instances are directly referring to base or async api. However we made some differences, which are reported below.

io-classes supports a novel hierarchy for error handling monads as well more familiar exception style. The new hierarchy provides bracket and finally functions in the MonadThrow class, while catch style operators are provided by a super-class MonadCatch. Both bracket and finally are the most common functions used to write code with robust exception handling, exposing them through the more basic MonadThrow class informs the reader / reviewer that no tricky error handling is done in that section of the code base.

IOSim exposes a detailed trace, which can be enhanced by labelling threads, or mutable variables, tracing Dynamic values (which can be recovered from the trace) or simple String based tracing. Although its agnostic with respect to the logging framework, it worked of us particularly well using contra-tracer. It has been used to develop, test and debug a complex, highly-concurrent, distributed system (ouroboros-network), in particular

  • write network simulations, to verify a complex networking stack;
  • write disk IO simulations, to verify a database implementation.

Supporting material

Packages

  • io-sim: provides two simulator interpreters: IOSim and IOSimPOR - an enhanced IOSim version with schedule discovery capabilities.
  • io-classes: class bases interface, which allows to to abstract over the monad
  • strict-stm: strict STM operations

Differences from base, async or exceptions packages

Major differences

  • threadDelay is using DiffTime (which is measured in seconds rather than microseconds).
  • regiterDelay is using DiffTime
  • timeout is using DiffTime
  • getMonotonicTime returns Time (a newtype wrapper around DiffTime)

Minor differences

Some of the types have more general kind signatures, e.g.

type Async :: (Type -> Type) -> Type -> Type

The first type of kind Type -> Type describes the monad which could be instantiated to IO, IOSim or some other monad stack build with monad transformers. The same applies to many other types, e.g. TVar, TMVar.

The following types although similar to the originals are not the same as the ones that come from base, async, or excpetions packages:

  • Handler (origin: base)
  • MaskingState (origin: base)
  • Concurrently (origin: async)
  • ExceptionInLinkedThread (origin: async)
  • ExitCase (origin: exceptions)

Issues

New issues should be reported in this repository, we still have a list of issues opened in the ouroboros-network repository: