[Haskell-cafe] Fighting the monad stack, MonadIO

[Judah Jacobson]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 7:50 AM, Adam Smyczek <adam.smyczek at gmail.com> wrote:
> For a small webapi binding I try to implement a session like monad
>  by building a stack including BrowserAction from Network.Browser
>  module as following:
>
>  newtype RBAction a = RBAction
>     { exec :: ErrorT String (StateT RBState BrowserAction) a }
>     deriving (Functor, Monad, MonadState RBState)
>
>  I would like the RBAction to implement MonadIO as well,
>  but fight with the liftIO function for hours now, without success.
>  Any idea how the implementation of liftIO could look like?

In order to make a stack of monads an instance of MonadIO, you need to
be able to run IO actions in the innermost monad (BrowserAction).
Ideally, that monad itself would be an instance of MonadIO; maybe the
authors of HTTP didn't do so because it would add a dependency on the
mtl package (which defines the MonadIO class).

Luckily, though, Network.Browser provides
ioAction :: IO a -> BrowserAction a
which is exactly what you need to write the MonadIO instances yourself.


-- Solution #1 --
> instance MonadIO BrowserAction where
>     liftIO = ioAction

Then you can add MonadIO to the deriving clause for RBAction.

-- Solution #2 --
> instance MonadIO RBAction where
>    liftIO = RBAction . lift . lift . ioAction

This pulls IO actions manually through the stack of transformers.  It
might be better because if the HTTP package ever provided its own
instance of MonadIO BrowserAction, that would conflict with #1.

Hope that helps,
-Judah