rauhala.info/posts/demobot.md

title	date
Functional architecture Pt. 1	2018-12-25

I'm lucky enough to work with Haskell professionally which gives me some view to good and maintainable real world architecture. In my opinion, one of the biggest contributing factors to how your general architecture is defined, is determined by the base application monad stack you are using.

Our actual product is mostly in the regular LoggingT (ReaderT app IO) base monad with whatever style you would imagine with that base monad in place. It's not entirely consistent, but close enough.

With all the talk about just having IO, ReaderT app IO, free monads or tagless final monads, I thought of trying different styles. For this post I'm focusing on the tagless final since it's most interesting for me right now.

IO

The most basic style. This is pretty much only suitable for the most basic of needs.

ReaderT app IO

How we mostly define the base monad. This is a really good way of doing things, it gives you a lot of leeway on how you can define the rest of your application.

Free monads

Free monads are a way of having a small constrained DSL or monad stack for defining your application. By constraining the user, you are also reducing the area for bugs. There is also some possibility for introspection, but usually this isn't a usable feature. Also since free monad applications need the full AST, they're quite a bit slower than the other solutions.

Tagless final

This is something I'm the least familiar with. If I have understood correctly, free monads and tagless final are more or less equivalent solutions in their power, but in tagless final you aren't creating the AST anywhere, which also means that you aren't paying for it either.

That out of the way, I had a small project idea for a bot that's easy to contribute to, difficult to make errors and easy to reason about. The project is at most a proof-of-concept and most definitely not production quality. Still, I hope it's complex enough to showcase the architecture.

The full source code is available at my git repository.

For the architecture to make sense, let me introduce two different actors: a core contributor that's familiar with Haskell and a external contributor that's familiar with programming, not necessarily with Haskell.

The repository is split into two parts, the library and the application.

The library

Provides the restricted monad classes (tagless final), extension points and the core bot main loop.

The application

Provides the implementation for the tagless final type classes, meaning that the application defines how the networking stack is handled, how database connectivity is done and so on. It also collects all the extensions for that specific application.

The core contributor is responsible for maintaining the library as well as the type class instances for the application type. The external contributor is responsible for maintaining one or multiple extensions that are restricted in their capability and complexity.

I'm restricting the capabilities of the monad in the library and extensions, meaning that I'm not allowing any IO. For example the networking is handled by a single MonadNetwork type class. This is the most complex type class in the library right now, using type families for defining a specific extension point for the messages. This could be something like 'event type' for Flowdock messages or 'source channel' for IRC messages.

data Request meta = Request { content :: Text
                            , meta    :: meta }
data Response meta = Response { content :: Text
                              , meta    :: meta }

class Monad m => MonadNetwork m where
  type Meta m :: *
  recvMsg :: m (Request (Meta m))
  putMsg :: Response (Meta m) -> m ()

Then we have the extension point which is more or less just a Request -> m (Maybe Response). I'm using rank n types here for qualifying the Meta extension point and forcing the allowed type classes to be a subset of the application monad stack, I don't want extension writers to be able to write messages to the bot network by themselves.

data Extension meta =
  Extension { act :: forall m. (meta ~ Meta m, MonadExtension m) => Request meta -> m (Maybe (Response meta))
            , name   :: String }

Last part of the library is the main loop, which is basically a free monad (tagless final) waiting for an interpreter. At least in this POC I find this style to be really good, it's really simplified, easy to read and hides a lot of the complexity, while bringing forth the core algorithm.

mainLoop :: forall m. (MonadCatch m, MonadBot m) => [Extension (Meta m)] -> m ()
mainLoop extensions = forever $ catch go handleFail
  where
    handleFail :: SomeException -> m ()
    handleFail e = logError $ tshow e
    go :: m ()
    go = do
      msg <- recvMsg
      responses <- catMaybes <$> mapM (`act` msg) extensions
      mapM_ putMsg responses

Then comes the actual application where we write the effectful interpreters. In this POC the interpreter is just a LoggingT IO a with the semantics of stdin/stdout. This is the only file where we're actually interacting with the outside world, everything else is just pure code.

instance MonadNetwork AppM where
  type Meta AppM = ()
  recvMsg = Request <$> liftIO T.getLine <*> pure ()
  putMsg Response{..} = liftIO . T.putStrLn $ content

Writing the extensions was the responsibility of external contributors and we already saw how the actual extension point was defined above. Using these extension points is really simple and here we see how the implementation is just a simple Request -> m (Maybe Response).

extension :: Extension ()
extension = Extension{..}
  where
    name = "hello world"
    act Request{..} | "hello" `T.isPrefixOf` content = return $ Just $ Response "Hello to you" ()
                    | otherwise = return Nothing