Cancelable IO — Typelevel Summit, 2018, Berlin
Presentation from the Typelevel Summit, 2018, Berlin by @alexelcu.
Resources:
Abstract #
Task / IO data types have been ported in Scala, inspired by Haskell’s monadic IO and are surging in popularity due to the need in functional programming for referential transparency, but also because controlling side effects by means of lawful, FP abstractions makes reasoning about asynchrony and concurrency so much easier. But concurrency brings with it race conditions, i.e. the ability to execute multiple tasks at the same time, possibly interrupting the losers and cleaning up resources afterwards and thus we end up reasoning about preemption.
This talk describes the design of Monix’s Task for cancelability and preemption, a design that has slowly transpired in cats-effect, first bringing serious performance benefits and now a sane design for cancelation. Topics include how cancelable tasks can be described, along with examples of race conditions that people can relate to, highlighting the challenges faced when people use an IO/Task data type that cannot be interrupted.