Hi, I am pleased to announce the first public release of global-variables. A package providing a global namespace for IORefs, MVars, and TVars. Hackage URL: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/global-variables-1.0 Source: http://bitbucket.org/jmg/global-variables/ Description: ---------------- 'Data.Global' provides a global namespace of 'IORef's, 'MVar's and 'TVar's. This namespace may be accessed in pure code. Yet reading and writing to those 'IORef's, 'MVar's and 'TVar's happens still in their respective monads. 'Data.Global' is designed to meet the following use cases: * Simplify the declaration of top-level mutable variables, by avoiding any pragmas as well as 'unsafePerformIO'. * Avoid having to pass references explicitly throughout the program in order to let distant parts communicate. * Enable a communication by convention scheme, where e.g. different libraries may communicate without code dependencies. * Simplify the "configuration problem" - at least for code in the IO monad. Note, that this library does not encourage sloppy software design by re-introducing all bad effects of global variables. Nevertheless, sometimes global variables are a suitable solution to a problem. In that case "Data.Global" simplifies and extends their handling significantly. Example: -------------
module Main where
import Data.Global import Data.IORef
counter :: IORef Int counter = declareIORef "Main.counter" 0
main :: IO () main = do counter `writeIORef` 1 readIORef counter >>= print
Note absence of pragmas and of unsafePerformIO! Future Plans: ------------------ * Support discovery/traversal of existing variables * TemplateHaskell support to generate private and unique variable names. Regards, Jean