[Haskell-cafe] Wrapping external process communication in a nice API?

[Mario Lang]

Tristan Cacqueray <tdecacqu at redhat.com> writes:

> On Sat, May 29, 2021 at 16:59 Mario Lang wrote:
>> Hi.
>>
>> For my chessIO package, I wrote a module to communicate with
>> UCI (Universal Chess Interface) speaking chess engines.
>>
>> This sort of thing is pretty new to me.
>> I settled to use attoparsec for parsing and
>> TChan to feed incoming data to the library users.
>> This is the first thing that I found which looked like it could work...
>>
>> I would be thrilled if someone with more experience in this area would
>> give my approach a review.  Let me know if something is glaringly
>> unidiomatic, I am sure you will find things.
>>
>> https://github.com/mlang/chessIO/blob/master/src/Game/Chess/UCI.hs
>>
>
> It seems like it would be safer to use withCreateProcess instead of
> createProcess to ensure the process is not left unattended.

Maybe I am unimaginative, but it seems to me I can not use
withCreateProcess as I need to read/write the Handles outside of the
initialisation phase.  It seems to me withCreateProcess would kill my
external process once my initialisation function is done.
Or do I misunderstand bracket somehow?
AIUI, withCreateProcess always calls cleanupProcess once the action is
done, right?

>> This is for me to learn, and to avoid putting weird stuff on hackage...
>> I actually prefer private mail, but a GitHub issue or even a PR are also
>> highly welcome.
>>
>
> I had the same need for a matrix bot where the events come from a ssh
> process stream. There is `streaming-commons` and `conduit-extra`, but I
> am not familiar enough with conduit to make it work.
>
> In the end I used `turtle` to callback with each line output.
> For what it worths, here is my current implementation:
>
> https://github.com/softwarefactory-project/gerritbot-matrix/blob/71644a21a9ac942bb5b2819208cc0b949e02b084/src/Gerritbot.hs#L24

Thanks.  The output of my subprocess is also line-based, so I use
ByteString.hGetLine and a call into attoparsec to make sense of the
output I receive.  Works so far.

-- 
CYa,
  ⡍⠁⠗⠊⠕