Great idea!

We already have syntax for package imports:
```
import "bytestring" Data.ByteString
```

Source plugin could probably pull and build package by CAS:
```
import "CAS_6ffeacff768590" Data.ByteString
```

That would reuse existing syntax without confusion. And without inconvenience of having to import expressions one by one.
Or declaring their types.
One could even add CAS hashes to Hackage db.

Wonder if source plugin can add `-package` parameters?

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020, 13:01 <haskell-cafe-request@haskell.org> wrote:
Send Haskell-Cafe mailing list submissions to
        haskell-cafe@haskell.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
        http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
        haskell-cafe-request@haskell.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
        haskell-cafe-owner@haskell.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Haskell-Cafe digest..."
Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Help with async library and killing child processes (YueCompl)
   2. Adding Content-Addressable Storage to GHC (Chris Done)



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: YueCompl <compl.yue@icloud.com>
To: Branimir Maksimovic <branimir.maksimovic@gmail.com>
Cc: haskell-cafe@haskell.org
Bcc: 
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2020 18:42:56 +0800
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Help with async library and killing child processes
Um, event processing applications by procedural programmers (part data analyst personnels for some) is a thing in my org, so I'm baking an DSL doing it.

On 2020-03-18, at 18:18, Branimir Maksimovic <branimir.maksimovic@gmail.com> wrote:

That's just library, not built into language. You can do it with forkIO as I do it per specifics

of application.

Greets,
Branimir.

On 3/18/20 11:06 AM, YueCompl wrote:
No, not to cancel a thread, but the business task on that thread's way ahead.  That's what Go's Context is designed for.

At Google, we require that Go programmers pass a Context parameter as the first argument to every function on the call path between incoming and outgoing requests. This allows Go code developed by many different teams to interoperate well. It provides simple control over timeouts and cancelation and ensures that critical values like security credentials transit Go programs properly.

Server frameworks that want to build on Context should provide implementations of Context to bridge between their packages and those that expect a Context parameter. Their client libraries would then accept a Context from the calling code. By establishing a common interface for request-scoped data and cancelation, Context makes it easier for package developers to share code for creating scalable services.
I (and seems Windows api too) strongly agree that cancelling a thread is problematic:

TerminateThread is a dangerous function that should only be used in the most extreme cases. You should call TerminateThread only if you know exactly what the target thread is doing, and you control all of the code that the target thread could possibly be running at the time of the termination. For example, TerminateThread can result in the following problems:

  • If the target thread owns a critical section, the critical section will not be released.
  • If the target thread is allocating memory from the heap, the heap lock will not be released.
  • If the target thread is executing certain kernel32 calls when it is terminated, the kernel32 state for the thread's process could be inconsistent.
  • If the target thread is manipulating the global state of a shared DLL, the state of the DLL could be destroyed, affecting other users of the DLL.

On 2020-03-18, at 17:16, Branimir Maksimovic <branimir.maksimovic@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm pretty sure you can't cancel goroutine. Actually I have

very bad experience with thread cancelation. Therefore flags

passed via channels/mvars or shared flags are used to stop

threads.

Greets,
Branimir.

On 3/18/20 10:10 AM, YueCompl wrote:
Idiomatic resource leakage prevention in short.

An app wants to be as responsive to its users as practically feasible, it would try multiple paths to load-balanced resources, and use the first response that come back, then cancel other paths. Cancellation can help reducing vain computation in such architectures, sometimes largely enough.

On 2020-03-18, at 16:58, Branimir Maksimovic <branimir.maksimovic@gmail.com> wrote:

What's wrong with forkIO?

Greets,
Branimir.

On 3/18/20 9:37 AM, YueCompl via Haskell-Cafe wrote:
If not for tight loops or other CPU intensive tasks, you may be interested in Edh, which introduces Go's goroutine to GHC runtime. But Edh threads add much higher overhead on top of GHC threads, so there's a price to pay for simplicity of end programmer's job.

It's briefly described at https://github.com/e-wrks/edh/tree/master/Tour#program--threading-model . This is very new and I'm right now actively working on it for PoC of an STM powered in-memory graph database implementation.

Best regards,
Compl

On 2020-03-18, at 11:15, Niklas Hambüchen <mail@nh2.me> wrote:

I've you're new to async, also check out my recent rework of the docs that talk about this topic specifically:

https://github.com/simonmar/async/pull/105/files

(To be available in the next release of async.)
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to:
http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.


_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to:
http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to:
http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.






---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Chris Done <haskell-cafe@chrisdone.com>
To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2020 11:21:29 +0000
Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Adding Content-Addressable Storage to GHC
Hi all,

Is there any effort or designs ongoing to add CAS (content-addressable storage) to GHC, as in Unison? <

== The idea ==

The summary of the idea is simply that top-level declarations can be addressed by a hash of their contents. Recursive definitions are transformed into the worker/wrapper to eliminate the self-referencing issue of hashing.

== Why I want this ==

There are lots of advantages to this, but the one that excites me the most is that we can move to running tests, especially property tests, at compile-time.

The main downside to running tests at compile-time, as seen done with template-haskell is that you will re-run tests every time the module is recompiled, making your dev cycle slower. However, if your tests are keyed upon CAS hashes, then those hashes are only invalidated when individual declarations actually change. This means the re-running of tests becomes granular at the declaration-level.  When a single test completes, either successfully or not, you can cache the result and lookup the result next time, using e.g. the SHA512 of the expression evaluated.

Therefore you could change a single function in a library and it would only re-run the tests that are actually affected, rather than running all the tests in the whole module, and rather than the more typical approach which is running ALL tests in a test suite just because one thing changed.

If you can couple tests with code then you can avoid the decoupling of code from the tests.

== Implementation approaches ==

There are various ways to implement this with varying degrees of satisfaction:

1. Use TH: reify declarations, inspect the AST, and produce a SHA512. Use ambient values such as the GHC version, instances in scope, extensions, ghc options, etc. With TH, I'm confident that you can only achieve an imperfect hash because I doubt that all information is available to TH.

Names that come from external packages could be treated as CAS'd at the scope of the package's installed hash. Ideally, you could have granularity into other packages. But it's not a necessity if you just want caching for your current development package.

2. Use a source plugin. A source plugin is already capable of accessing all GHC context information, so this might lead to more of a perfect hash.

3. Add it to GHC directly. Exposing a `expressionSHA512 :: Exp -> ByteString` could be one imaginary way to access this information. With such a function you could implement caching of fine-grained tests.

A related discussion is the deterministic builds: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis/deterministic-builds

Anyone else exploring this?

Cheers,

Chris




_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe