Using Mutable Global Variable in Haskell

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Or perhaps you can call it a black magic.

Backstory

Last night, Oom Boy (that's his real name) asked me whether I have ever used global variable in my programs. He said that he needs to keep a single integer (for goal count or something?) which could be updated in a long running process. Both of us agreed that using an external value holder, sqlite for example, has too much of an overhead. Surely I sent him a link from Haskell wiki and wrote a simple POC within a web server context. Yeah, not only I'm just a single trick pony, I also too lazy to write programs that runs for a long time and has some interactivity in it.

Confession

Truth to be told, I actually tried to implement it for one of my $WORK's project but decided not to because I was scared, man. I was scared because I don't know what actually happens under the hood of unsafePerformIO and that scary looking derivation.

Looking for a Viable Solution

Back to my friend's question and the program above, I'm pretty sure that it's not a wise decision to give a solution which I don't understand myself. So, I decided to look for existing libraries about mutable global state (hereon MGS) and found global-variables and safe-globals from a quick search. After poking those two repo's around for a bit, I've found out that I couldn't understand what global-variables doing while I "get" what safe-globals does to create MGS.

Basically, it creates a top level IORef (or MVar, or whatever it exports) declarations which can accessed anywhere using the magic of TemplateHaskell. For example:

declareIORef "ourreference" [t|Int|] [|69|]

when we put that in our source file, and as long as we can access it, we can use ourreference :: IORef Int everywhere. Why, you ask? Because we have declared that we have an IORef with the name of ourreference which has Int as its content with the default value of 69. Ain't that nice? It's nice.

Execution

Unfortunately, when I tried to use that library in my program above, I get an error about compilation failure or something like that. So, I forked that thing and tried to compile it then found out that this library has been abandonen by the author.

I took the easiest path, I forked the library and pressed my keyboard furiously while hoping it compiles. Fortunately, God didn't leave me, it compiles!

The next step was trying put that to that fork to my program above. From this:

-- A few classes, newtypes, and instances.

somethingInt :: Int -> IO Int
somethingInt i = do
  UniqueRef r <- runOnceIO
  n <- readIORef r
  writeIORef r (n + i)
  return (n + i)

-- And I don't know where to set the default value
-- perhaps this?
onceUniqueRef = unsafePerformIO $ newMVar Nothing

to this:

-- Here I declared `egg` as IORef thingy.
declareIORef "egg" [t|Int|] [|0|]

-- renamed from `somethingInt` to `joinOurEggs`.
joinOurEggs :: Int -> IO Int
joinOurEggs youreggs = do
  myeggs <- readIORef egg
  let oureggs = myeggs + youreggs
  writeIORef egg oureggs
  return oureggs

That's it! It's pretty clearer, right?

Word of Cautions

This section is intended to myself to never ever forget about data consistency, availability, and stuff like that. ACID, man! Not that Acid, though.

Lesson Learned

It's hard when I face a dilemma over API deprecation and introducing a new dependency (or two, three, six, etc). This time, I decided to bite the bullet and added SafeSemaphore to replace SampleVar from base and introduced safe-globals to my program above. Well, can't cry over spilled milk, right?