The rio library

A standard library for Haskell

The goal of the rio library is to make it easier to adopt Haskell for writing production software. It is intended as a cross between:

• Collection of well designed, trusted libraries
• Useful Prelude replacement
• A set of best practices for writing production quality Haskell code

This repository contains the rio library and other related libraries, such as rio-orphans. There is a tutorial on how to use rio available on FP Complete’s Haskell site. This README discusses project goals and collects other reference information.

Standard library

While GHC ships with a base library, as well as a number of other common packages like directory and transformers, there are large gaps in functionality provided by these libraries. This choice for a more minimalistic base is by design, but it leads to some unfortunate consequences:

• For a given task, it’s often unclear which is the right library to use
• When writing libraries, there is often concern about adding dependencies to any libraries outside of base, due to creating a heavier dependency footprint
• By avoiding adding dependencies, many libraries end up reimplementing the same functionality, often with incompatible types and type classes, leading to difficulty using libraries together

This library attempts to define a standard library for Haskell. One immediate response may be XKCD #927:

To counter that effect, this library takes a specific approach: it reuses existing, commonly used libraries. Instead of defining an incompatible Map type, for instance, we standardize on the commonly used one from the containers library and reexport it from this library.

This library attempts to define a set of libraries as “standard,” meaning they are recommended for use, and should be encouraged as dependencies for other libraries. It does this by depending on these libraries itself, and reexporting their types and functions for easy use.

Beyond the ecosystem effects we hope to achieve, this will hopefully make the user story much easier. For a new user or team trying to get started, there is an easy library to depend upon for a large percentage of common functionality.

See the dependencies of this package to see the list of packages considered standard. The primary interfaces of each of these packages is exposed from this library via a RIO.-prefixed module reexporting its interface.

Prelude replacement

The RIO module works as a prelude replacement, providing more functionality and types out of the box than the standard prelude (such as common data types like ByteString and Text), as well as removing common “gotchas”, like partial functions and lazy I/O. The guiding principle here is:

• If something is safe to use in general and has no expected naming conflicts, expose it from RIO
• If something should not always be used, or has naming conflicts, expose it from another module in the RIO. hierarchy.

Best practices

Below is a set of best practices we recommend following. You’re obviously free to take any, all, or none of this. Over time, these will probably develop into much more extensive docs. Some of these design decisions will be catered to by choices in the rio library.

For Haskellers looking for a set of best practices to follow: you’ve come to the right place!

Import practices

This library is intended to provide a fully loaded set of basic functionality. You should:

• Enable the NoImplicitPrelude language extension (see below)
• Add import RIO as your replacement prelude in all modules
• Use the RIO.-prefixed modules as necessary, imported using the recommended qualified names in the modules themselves. For example, import qualified RIO.ByteString as B. See the module documentation for more information.
• Infix operators may be imported unqualified, with a separate import line if necessary. For example, import RIO.Map ((?!), (\\)). Do this only if your module contains no overlapping infix names, regardless of qualification. For instance, if you are importing both RIO.Map.\\ and RIO.List.\\ do not import either one unqualified.

In the future, we may have editor integration or external tooling to help with import management.

Language extensions

Very few projects these days use bare-bones Haskell 98 or 2010. Instead, almost all codebases enable some set of additional language extensions. Below is a list of extensions we recommend as a good default, in that these are:

• Well accepted in the community
• Cause little to no code breakage versus leaving them off
• Are generally considered safe

Our recommended defaults are:

AutoDeriveTypeable
BangPatterns
BinaryLiterals
ConstraintKinds
DataKinds
DefaultSignatures
DeriveDataTypeable
DeriveFoldable
DeriveFunctor
DeriveGeneric
DeriveTraversable
DoAndIfThenElse
EmptyDataDecls
ExistentialQuantification
FlexibleContexts
FlexibleInstances
FunctionalDependencies
GADTs
GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving
InstanceSigs
KindSignatures
LambdaCase
MonadFailDesugaring
MultiParamTypeClasses
MultiWayIf
NamedFieldPuns
NoImplicitPrelude
OverloadedStrings
PartialTypeSignatures
PatternGuards
PolyKinds
RankNTypes
RecordWildCards
ScopedTypeVariables
StandaloneDeriving
TupleSections
TypeFamilies
TypeSynonymInstances
ViewPatterns

Notes on some surprising choices:

• RecordWildCards is really up for debate. It’s widely used, but rightfully considered by many to be dangerous. Open question about what we do with it.
• Despite the fact that OverloadedStrings can break existing code, we recommend its usage to encourage avoidance of the String data type. Also, for new code, the risk of breakage is much lower.
• MonadFailDesugaring helps prevent partial pattern matches in your code, see #85

Due to concerns about tooling usage (see issue #9), we recommend adding these extensions on-demand in your individual source modules instead of including them in your package.yaml or .cabal files.

There are other language extensions which are perfectly fine to use as well, but are not recommended to be turned on by default:

CPP
TemplateHaskell
ForeignFunctionInterface
MagicHash
UnliftedFFITypes
TypeOperators
UnboxedTuples
PackageImports
QuasiQuotes
DeriveAnyClass
DeriveLift
StaticPointers

GHC Options

We recommend using these GHC complier warning flags on all projects, to catch problems that might otherwise go overlooked:

• -Wall
• -Wcompat
• -Widentities
• -Wincomplete-record-updates
• -Wincomplete-uni-patterns
• -Wpartial-fields
• -Wredundant-constraints

You may add them per file, or to your package.yaml, or pass them on the command line when running ghc. We include these in the project template’s package.yaml file.

For code targeting production use, you should also use the flag that turns all warnings into errors, to force you to resolve the warnings before you ship your code:

• -Werror

Further reading:

• Alexis King explains why these are a good idea in her blog post which was the original inspiration for this section.
• Max Tagher gives an in-depth overview of these flags, and more, in his blog post.

Monads

A primary design choice you’ll need to make in your code is how to structure your monads. There are many options out there, with various trade-offs. Instead of going through all of the debates, we’re going to point to an existing blog post, and here just give recommendations.

• If your code is going to perform I/O: it should live in the RIO monad. RIO is “reader IO.” It’s the same as ReaderT env IO, but includes some helper functions in this library and leads to nicer type signatures and error messages.

• If you need to provide access to specific data to a function, do it via a typeclass constraint on the env, not via a concrete env. For example, this is bad:

  myFunction :: RIO Config Foo
  

  This is good:

  class HasConfig env where
    configL :: Lens' env Config -- more on this in a moment
  myFunction :: HasConfig env => RIO env Foo
  

  Reason: by using typeclass constraints on the environment, we can easily compose multiple functions together and collect up the constraints, which wouldn’t be possible with concrete environments. We could go more general with mtl-style typeclasses, like MonadReader or MonadHasConfig, but RIO is a perfect balance point in the composability/concreteness space (see blog post above for more details).

• When defining Has-style typeclasses for the environments, we use lenses (which are exposed by RIO) because it provides for easy composability. We also leverage superclasses wherever possible. As an example of how this works in practice:

  -- Defined in RIO.Logger
  class HasLogFunc env where
    logFuncL :: Lens' env LogFunc
  
  class HasConfig env where
    configL :: Lens' env Config
  instance HasConfig Config where
    configL = id
  
  data Env = Env { envLogFunc :: !LogFunc, envConfig :: !Config }
  class (HasLogFunc env, HasConfig env) => HasEnv env where
    envL :: Lens' env Env
  instance HasLogFunc Env where
    logFuncL = lens envLogFunc (\x y -> x { envLogFunc = y })
  instance HasConfig Env where
    configL = lens envConfig (\x y -> x { envConfig = y })
  instance HasEnv Env where
    envL = id
  
  -- And then, at some other part of the code
  data SuperEnv = SuperEnv { seEnv :: !Env, seOtherStuff :: !OtherStuff }
  instance HasLogFunc SuperEnv where
    logFuncL = envL.logFuncL
  instance HasConfig SuperEnv where
    configL = envL.configL
  instance HasEnv SuperEnv where
    envL = lens seEnv (\x y -> x { seEnv = y })
  

• If you’re writing code that you want to be usable outside of RIO for some reason, you should stick to the good mtl-style typeclasses: MonadReader, MonadIO, MonadUnliftIO, MonadThrow, and PrimMonad. It’s better to use MonadReader+Has than to create new typeclasses like MonadLogger, though usually just sticking with the simpler RIO env is fine (and can easily be converted to the more general form with liftRIO). You should avoid using the following typeclasses (intentionally not exposed from this library): MonadBase, MonadBaseControl, MonadCatch, and MonadMask.

Exceptions

For in-depth discussion, see safe exception handling. The basic idea is:

• If something can fail, and you want people to deal with that failure every time (e.g., lookup), then return a Maybe or Either value.
• If the user will usually not want to deal with it, then use exceptions. In the case of pure code, use a MonadThrow constraint. In the case of IO code: use runtime exceptions via throwIO (works in the RIO monad too).
• You’ll be upset and frustrated that you don’t know exactly how some IO action can fail. Accept that pain, live with it, internalize it, use tryAny, and move on. It’s the price we pay for async exceptions.
• Do all resource allocations with functions like bracket and finally.

It’s a good idea to define an app-wide exception type:

data AppExceptions
  = NetworkChangeError Text
  | FilePathError FilePath
  | ImpossibleError
  deriving (Typeable)

instance Exception AppExceptions

instance Show AppExceptions where
  show =
    \case
      NetworkChangeError err -> "network error: " <> (unpack err)
      FilePathError fp -> "error accessing filepath at: " <> fp
      ImpossibleError -> "this codepath should never have been executed. Please report a bug."

Strict data fields

Make data fields strict by default, unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.

Project template

We provide a project template which sets up lots of things for you out of the box. You can use it by running:

$ stack new projectname rio

Safety first

This library intentionally puts safety first, and therefore avoids promoting partial functions and lazy I/O. If you think you need lazy I/O: you need a streaming data library like conduit instead.

When to generalize

A common question in Haskell code is when should you generalize. Here are some simple guidelines. For parametric polymorphism: almost always generalize, it makes your type signatures more informative and functions more useful. In other words, reverse :: [a] -> [a] is far better than reverse :: [Int] -> [Int].

When it comes to typeclasses: the story is more nuanced. For typeclasses provided by RIO, like Foldable or Traversable, it’s generally a good thing to generalize to them when possible. The real question is defining your own typeclasses. As a general rule: avoid doing so as long as possible. And if you define a typeclass: make sure its usage can’t lead to accidental bugs by allowing you to swap in types you didn’t expect.

Module hierarchy

The RIO.Prelude. module hierarchy contains identifiers which are reexported by the RIO module. The reason for this is to make it easier to view the generated Haddocks. The RIO module itself is intended to be imported unqualified, with NoImplicitPrelude enabled. All other modules are not reexported by the RIO module, and will document inside of them whether they should be imported qualified or unqualified.