+1, BTW. let's call it atomicSwapIORef to keep sync with MVar/TVar's counterpart.
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Date: Sat,Jun 23,2018 4:15 PM
Subject: Re: Proposal: Add an atomic IORef replacement operation
Currently, atomicWriteIORef is implemented using atomicModifyIORef. This is not ideal: the latter allocates memory while the former shouldn't need to. In the process of writing alternative implementations, I realized that we can efficiently support an atomic operation that replaces the value in an IORef, returning the previous value. I propose that we add, to Data.IORef, a function to do so:
atomicReplaceIORef :: IORef a -> a -> IO a