This document is about Task, an alternative for Scalaz's Task or Scala's Future.
Note this is work in progress and this document suffered multiple modifications already:
UPDATE - May 30, 2016 - This document is now obsolete, replaced by the Monix Task documentation:
Yes, I will. I'm currently fleshing out the implementation, since this didn't exist yesterday morning and after that I'll provide a comparison :-)
Updated :-)
Thanks for this. Very interesting.
Can you clarify whether these programs the same or not?
val x =
for {
_ <- Task { println("hi") }
_ <- Task { println("hi") }
} yield ()and
val hi = Task { println("hi") }
val x =
for {
_ <- hi
_ <- hi
} yield ()
Depending on how the final implementation looks, perhaps you may also want to see how suitable it may be to be in Cats itself? :-)
That being said, we do have a WIP branch here - I believe the progress stopped at making it stack safe, with tests showing it StackOverflowError-ing.
@tpolecat yes, it behaves like you'd expect, the two programs are the same.
@adelbertc sure; btw, this implementation is stack safe
looks great! 👍
@tpolecat re question from cats gitter: "is there a better place to discuss this?"
@adelbertc re WIP branch
Both points were brought up by @non in https://github.com/non/cats/issues/32#issuecomment-141079117, but that was a while ago. Specifically:
I think using this issue to brainstorm, ask questions, and help try to flesh out the requirements of a task in Cats would definitely be helpful.
and
Thus, feature/task (in its current state) is not eligible to be merged.
Just as a suggestion, perhaps the old issue has got stale and rather than try and reboot it, it might be worth launching a V2 issue?
👍 @inthenow.
I have updated the document. It now contains a list of what this implementation does better than the Task in Scalaz, as I think @milessabin wanted. See the "What's better than Scalaz?" section.
Cool. Before I/we do this, there are two issues regarding moving the current Future instances from Cats to Alleycats - non/alleycats#26 and https://github.com/non/cats/issues/589.
Given this - would Alleycats be the better place to open the new issue and possible first implementation?
Changed again (Dec 30).
scalaz.concurrent.Task is not very good. Using just a reasonable IO type, it should be possible to subsume Task's use cases with some uses of MVar-like atomic-references. For example:
scalaz/scalaz@series/7.3.x...puffnfresh:feature/concurrent-io
I highly recommend focusing on doing a good job at I/O and then using that to talk about concurrency, rather than trying to do the opposite.
@puffnfresh: 👍
Hi all,
You might be interested to look at my matterhorn experiment: https://github.com/aloiscochard/matterhorn
It is basically a specialized interpreter for IO actions: https://github.com/aloiscochard/matterhorn/blob/master/core/src/main/scala/rts/Interpreter.scala
There is some tests and benchmarks showing how it work:
https://github.com/aloiscochard/matterhorn/blob/master/core/src/test/scala/CoreSpec.scala
https://github.com/aloiscochard/matterhorn/blob/master/bench/src/main/scala/pure.scala
The approach to concurrency is to use a STM, I just did plug a library for having rapid prototyping.
Good luck
@aloiscochard, @puffnfresh thanks, will take a look.
scalaz.concurrent.Task is not very good. Using just a reasonable IO type, it should be possible to subsume Task's use cases with some uses of MVar-like atomic-references. For example:
I agree, and that is the route we are going with FS2's Task type (which I suppose could be renamed to 'IO'), which implements MVar-like references and then uses that to implement async (and lots of other operations, like parallelTraverse, as well as all the concurrent stream operations of FS2 itself): https://github.com/functional-streams-for-scala/fs2/blob/topic/redesign/core/src/main/scala/fs2/Async.scala#L75
Could you put together a side-by-side comparison between the design you're proposing here and Scalaz's
Task? Something short, just bullet points with a few code snippets to illustrate usage.