[Haskell-cafe] [ANN] dejafu-0.1.0.0: Overloadable primitives for testable, potentially non-deterministic, concurrency.

[Michael Walker]

Hi cafe,

For the past few months I've been working on a library for concurrency testing
in Haskell, which I'll be giving a talk on at the Haskell Symposium next week.
Now it's on Hackage!

---

Déjà Fu is a library for developing and testing concurrent Haskell programs, it
provides a typeclass-abstraction over GHC’s regular concurrency API, allowing
the concrete implementation to be swapped out.

Why do we need this? Well, concurrency is really hard to get right. Empirical
studies have found that many real-world concurrency bugs can be exhibited with
small test cases using as few as two threads: so it’s not just big concurrent
programs that are hard, small ones are too. We as programmers just don’t seem to
have a very good intuition for traditional threads-and-shared-memory-style
concurrency. The typical approach to testing concurrent programs is to just run
them lots of times, but that doesn’t provide any hard coverage guarantees, and
then we need to wonder: how many runs do we need?

Fortunately, there has been a lot of research into testing concurrency in the
past several years. Systematic concurrency testing is an approach where the
source of nondeterminism, the actual scheduler, is swapped out for one under the
control of the testing framework. This allows possible schedules to be
systematically explored, giving real coverage guarantees for our tests.

This is a library implementing systematic concurrency testing. It provides two
typeclasses, MonadConc to abstract over much of Control.Concurrent and related
modules, and MonadSTM, to similarly abstract over Control.Monad.STM.

## How to use it:

If you’re not making use of any IO in your code other than for concurrency, the
transition to using MonadConc and MonadSTM will probably just be a textual
substitution:

- IO is replaced with MonadConc m => m
- STM with MonadSTM m => m
- *IORef with *CRef
- *MVar with *CVar
- *TVar with *CTVar
- Most other things have the same name, and so can be replaced by just swapping
  imports around.

If you are using other IO, you will need a gentle sprinkling of MonadIO and
liftIO in your code as well.

## Is this really just a drop-in replacement for IO/STM?

That’s the idea, yes.

More specifically, the IO instance of MonadConc and the STM instance of MonadSTM
just use the regular IO and STM functions, and so should have no noticeable
change in behaviour, except for CRef, the IORef equivalent, where modifyCRef
behaves like atomicModifyIORef, not modifyIORef.

There are some other differences which can lead to incorrect results when
testing, but which should not affect code when used in an IO or STM context.
Specifically: Control.Monad.Conc.Class.getNumCapabilities can lie to encourage
more concurrency when testing; and Control.Exception.catch can catch exceptions
from pure code, but Control.Monad.Conc.Class.catch can’t (except for the IO
instance).

---

There is a blog post with references to prior posts and related papers here:
http://www.barrucadu.co.uk/posts/2015-08-27-announce-dejafu.html

-- 
Michael Walker (http://www.barrucadu.co.uk)
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