effectful VS eff

Also a much simpler alternative in my opinion to monad transformers is effectful:

https://github.com/haskell-effectful/effectful

Here's a talk on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUoYKBLOOrE

effectful got rid of all issues I listed (I expanded a little on it here).

There is also a long document on Issues with the Transformer/mtl library.

cats-effects -> https://github.com/haskell-effectful/effectful

I think ReaderT over IO or an algebraic effect system that uses it under the hood like effectful is the way to go. However, you mentioned redux, so perhaps you'd be comfortable with organizing things using TEA (the elm architecture)? You would have actions that different components listen to , and your async stuff could be handled using subscriptions.

API for basic usage is very similar, but things quickly go south once you want to use higher order effects (i.e. effects that make use of the m type parameter). A lot of things then become very hard to write due to complex types or outright impossible (this issue is a good example - a reasonable thing to do that is very straightforward to write with effectful, apparently impossible to do with polysemy).

> Lets say you have a huge overly-convoluted Haskell program. Somewhere deep down a call hierachy of pure functions you need to print something to the console. That is not easy to refactor.

> Or vice-versa you have a huge convoluted program where everything happens inside an IO monad because at some point something is written to the console. Now you realize you dont need to write to the console.

These problems are essentially completely resolved these days by a modern effect system like effectful. Basically, they allow you to do arbitrary effects deep down a call stack with minimal plumbing (you still have adjust the types, as you should: that's the point of effect tracking!) and also to remove effects, so you can easily convert between pure code and "effectful code that just so happens to do no effects".

https://github.com/haskell-effectful/effectful

Also note that Polysemy has some really bad performance characteristics. Don't know how much of a problem it could be at such a small scale, but if you need to use an effect system, maybe something faster like effectful would be a better choice.

See also https://github.com/haskell-effectful/effectful/issues/99.

FYI, transformers and mtl have several subtle traps. You can read about them here.

You can swap-out implementations for testing, avoid the crazy N^2 instances issues, etc. They're pretty cool. Currently there are many competing libraries. polysemy and eff both have good examples on their homepages.

Effect systems and Algebraic effects. ocaml has just released a stripped-down effect system. People are also working on Effect systems for Haskell (eff, fused-effects, effet). Koka is a language built with effects first and foremost and it’s rapidly gaining popularity. Unison also has effects.

There are also a few subtle issues that arise with delconts related to semantics of higher order effects (see here and here), but they might be solvable.

Details are in https://github.com/hasura/eff/issues/12 and https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/pywuqg/unresolved_challenges_of_scoped_effects_and_what/.

You'll get fearless parallel with STM in the mixture, and GHC is getting a work in progress effect system for Haskell, as Delimited continuation primops has been merged.

My last example is algebraic effects, some of which have been made possible in a both practical and efficient way thanks to extremely recent research, and that I can use to implement architectures like Ports and Adapters or Clean Architecture and have very maintainable code. (Extensible Effects — An Alternative to Monad Transformers was published in 2013, Effect Handlers in Scope was published in 2014 and they are behind Polysemy, while there is ongoing work on effects with even better performance, like Eff)

cleff's Eff monad is esentially implemented as a ReaderT IO. [...] This is first done by eff, [...]

Here is link number 1 - Previous text "eff"

Languages such as Koka only support algebraic effects, not scoping operations such as catch and listen. The Effect Handlers in Scope paper introduces scoping operations, which lead to the Haskell libraries fused-effects and polysemy, but they turned out to have some weird semantics. eff is her effort to fix that.

There are a few languages that have algebraic effect systems, most notably Haskell, but these systems are implemented as libraries, not baked into the language (which can have advantages and disadvantages).