[Haskell-cafe] ANN: unsafely, Flexible access control for unsafe operations and instances

19 Jan 2014

      Yesterday, I uploaded the library `unsafely` to Hackage:
    http://hackage.haskell.org/package/unsafely

This package provides you the functionality for access control for unsafe operations and instances.
This purpose is somewhat similar to GHC's `NullaryTypeClasses`[^1] extension, but permits more flexible access control.

With this package, you can tag functions and type-class instances as *unsafe* in type constraint.

This library is useful when:

* You want to restrict the access to *unsafe* operations by type constraint
* You have to provide some *unsafe* type-instances for practical reasons.
  For example, when writing computer algebra system with type-classes, `Double` type doesn't even form a semi ring,
  but we need the instance `Semiring Double` if we want to combine the symbolic computations and the numerical methods.

A simple example:

```haskell
{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleContexts, FlexibleInstances, RankNTypes #-}
{-# LANGUAGE UndecidableInstances                            #-}
module Main where
import Data.Constraint.Unsafely
import Data.IORef
import Data.Proxy
import System.IO.Unsafe

saferUnsafePerformIO :: Unsafely IO => IO a -> a
saferUnsafePerformIO = unsafePerformIO

global :: Unsafely IO => IORef Int
global = saferUnsafePerformIO $ newIORef 0

unsafelyIO :: (Unsafely IO => a) -> a
unsafelyIO = unsafely (Proxy :: Proxy IO)

main :: IO ()
main = do
  unsafelyIO $ readIORef global
  -- | uncommenting following line causes type-error!
  -- readIORef global
  return ()
```

For more detail, please read Haddock[^2].

[^1]: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/7642
[^2]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/unsafely-0.1.0.0.1/docs/Data-Constraint-U...

-- Hiromi ISHII
konn.jinro@gmail.com