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safe-globals: Safe top-level mutable variables which scope like ordinary values

[ bsd3, data, library ] [ Propose Tags ]

This library provides a way to declare IORefs, TVars, Chans, etc. at the top level of a module.

  • Declarations are safe. User code does not invoke unsafePerformIO or compiler pragmas.

  • Variables are ordinary module-level bindings. Their scope can be controlled through the usual module import/export mechanism. Unrelated code cannot interfere with private variables by guessing some global identifier.

  • References are statically typed, and polymorphic references are statically forbidden.

  • The implementation is simple, and closely follows existing common practice.

This library does not prevent the software design problems caused by global state. Rather, it provides some implementation safety for those circumstances where global state really is necessary.

Fundamentally this library just provides Template Haskell macros for the usual unsafePerformIO trick, so it is subject to the same caveats. In particular, linking a module and then loading the same module dynamically through the GHC API may produce two copies of the same top-level variable. See the documentation of unsafePerformIO for additional compiler-specific requirements.

This library may not work properly on GHC before 7.4, due to a GHC bug: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5558

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Versions [RSS] 0.1, 0.1.1
Dependencies base (>=3 && <5), stm (>=2.1), template-haskell (>=2.4) [details]
License BSD-3-Clause
Author Keegan McAllister <mcallister.keegan@gmail.com>
Maintainer Keegan McAllister <mcallister.keegan@gmail.com>
Category Data
Source repo head: git clone git://github.com/kmcallister/safe-globals
Uploaded by KeeganMcAllister at 2011-12-21T16:50:23Z
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Reverse Dependencies 1 direct, 0 indirect [details]
Downloads 2359 total (7 in the last 30 days)
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Status Docs uploaded by user
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Readme for safe-globals-0.1.1

[back to package description] 
safe-globals provides safe top-level mutable variables for Haskell,
which scope like ordinary values.

Documentation is hosted at http://hackage.haskell.org/package/safe-globals

To build the documentation yourself, run

  $ cabal configure && cabal haddock --hyperlink-source

This will produce HTML documentation under dist/doc/html/safe-globals