[Haskell-cafe] Re: Yet another IO initializer: Effectful declarations and an ACIO monad

[Ian.Stark at ed.ac.uk]

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004, Jules Bean wrote:
>
> On 26 Nov 2004, at 12:08, George Russell wrote:
>
>> >  Yes, you need to explicitly initialise it; but you don't need then to
>> >  pass the initialized handle all around your code.  The painful plumbing
>> >  goes away.
>> I think this is either unwieldy or inefficient. Imagine a large library
>> containing lots of these things which need to be initialised if used.  Then
>> I predict that one of two things will happen
>> (a) people will end up writing boilerplace code at the start of the main
>>     action which does
>>        initialise1
>>        initialise2
>>        ... blah blah ...
>> (b) (more likely).  There will be a single initialisation function for the
>>     library, which initialises everything, even the stuff you don't 
>> actually
>>     want.
>
> To me this seems perfectly fine. Ian's proposal gets us TWIs, which I can see 
> the need for. Implicit initialisation (i.e. stateful initialisation functions 
> happening non-deterministicly, like java static{} blocks or C++'s similar 
> feature) is a can of worms I currently see no value in opening.

It's true that ACIO only does some things: and that includes global 
variables initialized with values.  I think that's pretty useful; but 
it's true that we don't get initializing with arbitrary IO activity.

Even when you do want to open the can of worms, things are better: 
unsafePerformIO needs an accompanying NOINLINE pragma, whereas pushing 
things through assertIOisACIO will guarantee execution no more than once.

I.