[Haskell-cafe] Algebraic Effects?

Vanessa McHale vanessa.mchale at iohk.io
Tue Sep 18 02:57:58 UTC 2018


You can certainly create a new type signature for things that can fail
with error or undefined, but keep in mind that the *real* logical
bottom, viz. infinite recursion, is still there. I know that Idris and
ATS both have some mechanism for checking for non-termination (and in
the case of ATS, it is dealt with as an algebraic effect I believe), but
GHC would not truly be able to eliminate bottoms without writing an
extension yourself.

In the case of the bug you mentioned I'd guess it's just API
stability/the Haskell ecosystem. I believe error and undefined are in
the Haskell2010 report so I doubt they're going to stop causing pain
anytime soon :)


On 09/17/2018 08:15 PM, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:
> I picked up Haskell fairly recently, as a "better imperative programming
> language" to implement highly concurrent code to survey DNSSEC and DANE
> adoption on the Internet.  The results are great, I got a DNS library,
> network and TLS stack that provide effortless concurrency, and a decent
> interface to Postgres in the form of the Hasql package and performance
> is excellent.
>
> But I'm still a novice in functional programming, with much to learn.
> So it is only this week that I've started to read about Algebraic effects,
> and I curious how the Haskell community views these nowadays.
>
> If this is a toxic topic raised by newbies who should just Google
> past discussions instead, feel free to say so...
>
> Does the below thread still sum up the situation:
>
>   https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3nkv2a/why_dont_we_use_effect_handlers_as_opposed_to/
>
> I see Haskell now also has an Eff monad.  Is it widely used?  Efficient?
> Are there other Haskell libraries that build on it as a foundation?
>
> One potential advantage that comes to mind with Effects is that the
> exceptions raised by a computation can enter its signature and it
> becomes less likely that a library will leak unexpected exception
> types from its dependencies to its callers if the expected exceptions
> are explicit in the signatures and checked by the type system.
>
> For example, a while back the Haskell Network.DNS library leaked exceptions
> from a parser library that was an internal implementation detail, and my code
> had rare crashes on malformed DNS packets, since I did not expect or handle
> that exception.
>

-- 



*Vanessa McHale*
Functional Compiler Engineer | Chicago, IL

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