[Haskell-cafe] coding a queue with reactive

[sam.roberts.1983 at gmail.com]

Hi all,

I hope someone is interested in helping me out with the reactive library.
I am trying to implement a function "queue" in reactive:

queue :: Double -> Event a -> Event a

This is a simple queue: events from the event stream coming into the queue,
queue up waiting to be processed one by one. Processing an event takes a
constant amount of time for every event. The output of the queue function
is the stream of processed events.

My current (deficient) implementation of the queue function is:

queue dt eventsIn =
do
(a,exitT) <- withExitTime eventsIn
_ <- atTime exitT
return a
where
withExitTime = scanlE calcExitTime (undefined, -1/0) . withTimeE
calcExitTime (_,prevExitT) (a,inT) = (a, (max inT prevExitT) + dt)

I am having three problems.

1 - I find my implementation of the queue is less clear then an imperative
description of a queue.

2 - I rely on being able to calculate the exit time of an event when it
first arrives at the queue, whereas an imperative queue would simply store
the event in queue and only need to calculate the output time once the event
was popped off the queue. If I want to do something similar with my  
function,
I think I need to make some sort of recursive definition of a queue which
responds to it's own exit events. I've tried to code this up, but have not
managed to wrap my brain around the concept.

3 - The code performs horribly! I am guessing that this is because I have  
not
told reactive that the exit events preserve the ordering of the input  
events,
but I'm not sure how to encode that relationship in reactive.

(It's worth noting here that I actually have a fourth problem too: I get
linker errors while trying to compile a profiling version of the program ...
but that's a separate topic.)

It's also worth noting, from a performance point of view, that a much  
simpler
"delay" function with similar use of the bind function performs badly as  
well:

delay :: Double -> Event a -> Event a
delay dt es = do (e,t) <- withTimeE es
_ <- atTime (t+dt)
return e

I'd appreciate any light that anyone could shed on any of these problems.
If there's a better way of structuring my queue function, or if there's a
better way of changing event times in reactive, I am open to all  
suggestions.

Many thanks,
Sam
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