FP Complete


This blog post is an initial announcement of a new package, safe-exceptions (and Github repo). This is a follow up to a number of comments I made in last week’s blog post. To quote the README:

Safe, consistent, and easy exception handling

Runtime exceptions – as exposed in base by the Control.Exception module – have long been an intimidating part of the Haskell ecosystem. This package, and this README for the package, are intended to overcome this. By providing an API that encourages best practices, and explaining the corner cases clearly, the hope is to turn what was previously something scary into an aspect of Haskell everyone feels safe using.

This is an initial release of the package. I fully expect the library to expand in the near future, and in particular there are two open issues for decisions that need to be made in the short term. I’m releasing the package in its current state since:

  1. I think it’s useful as-is
  2. I’m hoping to get feedback on how to improve it

On the second point, I’ve created a survey to get feedback on the interruptible/uninterruptible issue and the throw naming issue. Both are described in this blog post.

I’m hoping this library can bring some sanity and comfort to people dealing with IO and wanting to ensure proper exception handling! Following is the content of the README, which can also be read on Github.

Goals

This package provides additional safety and simplicity versus Control.Exception by having its functions recognize the difference between synchronous and asynchronous exceptions. As described below, synchronous exceptions are treated as recoverable, allowing you to catch and handle them as well as clean up after them, whereas asynchronous exceptions can only be cleaned up after. In particular, this library prevents you from making the following mistakes:

Quickstart

This section is intended to give you the bare minimum information to use this library (and Haskell runtime exceptions in general) correctly.

Hopefully this will be able to get you up-and-running quickly.

Request to readers: if there are specific workflows that you’re unsure of how to accomplish with this library, please ask so we can develop a more full-fledged cookbook as a companion to this file.

Terminology

We’re going to define three different versions of exceptions. Note that these definitions are based on how the exception is thrown, not based on what the exception itself is:

Why catch asynchronous exceptions?

If we never want to be able to recover from asynchronous exceptions, why do we want to be able to catch them at all? The answer is for resource cleanup. For both sync and async exceptions, we would like to be able to acquire resources – like file descriptors – and register a cleanup function which is guaranteed to be run. This is exemplified by functions like bracket and withFile.

So to summarize:

Determining sync vs async

Unfortunately, GHC’s runtime system provides no way to determine if an exception was thrown synchronously or asynchronously, but this information is vitally important. There are two general approaches to dealing with this:

Both of these approaches have downsides. For the downsides of the type-based approach, see the caveats section at the end. The problems with the first are more interesting to us here:

Therefore, this package takes the approach of trusting type information to determine if an exception is asynchronous or synchronous. The details are less interesting to a user, but the basics are: we leverage the extensible extension system in GHC and state that any extension type which is a child of SomeAsyncException is an async exception. All other exception types are assumed to be synchronous.

Handling of sync vs async exceptions

Once we’re able to distinguish between sync and async exceptions, and we know our goals with sync vs async, how we handle things is pretty straightforward:

With this explanation, it’s useful to consider async exceptions as “stronger” or more severe than sync exceptions, as the next section will demonstrate.

Exceptions in cleanup code

One annoying corner case is: what happens if, when running a cleanup function after an exception was thrown, the cleanup function itself throws an exception. For this, we’ll consider action `onException` cleanup. There are four different possibilities:

Our guiding principle is: we cannot hide a more severe exception with a less severe exception. For example, if action threw a sync exception, and then cleanup threw an async exception, it would be a mistake to rethrow the sync exception thrown by action, since it would allow the user to recover when that is not desired.

Therefore, this library will always throw an async exception if either the action or cleanup thows an async exception. Other than that, the behavior is currently undefined as to which of the two exceptions will be thrown. The library reserves the right to throw away either of the two thrown exceptions, or generate a new exception value completely.

Typeclasses

The exceptions package provides an abstraction for throwing, catching, and cleaning up from exceptions for many different monads. This library leverages those type classes to generalize our functions.

Naming

There are a few choices of naming that differ from the base libraries:

Caveats

Let’s talk about the caveats to keep in mind when using this library.

Checked vs unchecked

There is a big debate and difference of opinion regarding checked versus unchecked exceptions. With checked exceptions, a function states explicitly exactly what kinds of exceptions it can throw. With unchecked exceptions, it simply says “I can throw some kind of exception.” Java is probably the most famous example of a checked exception system, with many other languages (including C#, Python, and Ruby) having unchecked exceptions.

As usual, Haskell makes this interesting. Runtime exceptions are most assuredly unchecked: all exceptions are converted to SomeException via the Exception typeclass, and function signatures do not state which specific exception types can be thrown (for more on this, see next caveat). Instead, this information is relegated to documentation, and unfortunately is often not even covered there.

By contrast, approaches like ExceptT and EitherT are very explicit in the type of exceptions that can be thrown. The cost of this is that there is extra overhead necessary to work with functions that can return different types of exceptions, usually by wrapping all possible exceptions in a sum type.

This library isn’t meant to settle the debate on checked vs unchecked, but rather to bring sanity to Haskell’s runtime exception system. As such, this library is decidedly in the unchecked exception camp, purely by virtue of the fact that the underlying mechanism is as well.

Explicit vs implicit

Another advantage of the ExceptT/EitherT approach is that you are explicit in your function signature that a function may fail. However, the reality of Haskell’s standard libraries are that many, if not the vast majority, of IO actions can throw some kind of exception. In fact, once async exceptions are considered, every IO action can throw an exception.

Once again, this library deals with the status quo of runtime exceptions being ubiquitous, and gives the rule: you should consider the IO type as meaning both that a function modifies the outside world, and may throw an exception (and, based on the previous caveat, may throw any type of exception it feels like).

There are attempts at alternative approaches here, such as unexceptionalio. Again, this library isn’t making a value statement on one approach versus another, but rather trying to make today’s runtime exceptions in Haskell better.

Type-based differentiation

As explained above, this library makes heavy usage of type information to differentiate between sync and async exceptions. While the approach used is fairly well respected in the Haskell ecosystem today, it’s certainly not universal, and definitely not enforced by the Control.Exception module. In particular, throwIO will allow you to synchronously throw an exception with an asynchronous type, and throwTo will allow you to asynchronously throw an exception with a synchronous type.

The functions in this library prevent that from happening via exception type wrappers, but if an underlying library does something surprising, the functions here may not work correctly. Further, even when using this library, you may be surprised by the fact that throw Foo `catch` (Foo -> ...) won’t actually trigger the exception handler if Foo looks like an asynchronous exception.

The ideal solution is to make a stronger distinction in the core libraries themselves between sync and async exceptions.

Deadlock detection exceptions

Two exceptions types which are handled surprisingly are BlockedIndefinitelyOnMVar and BlockedIndefinitelyOnSTM. Even though these exceptions are thrown asynchronously by the runtime system, for our purposes we treat them as synchronous. The reasons are twofold:

Possible future changes

Interruptible vs uninterruptible masking

This discussion is now being tracked at: https://github.com/fpco/safe-exceptions/issues/3

In Control.Exception, allocation functions and cleanup handlers in combinators like bracket are masked using the (interruptible) mask function, in contrast to uninterruptibleMask. There have been some debates about the correctness of this in the past, notably a libraries mailing list discussion kicked off by Eyal Lotem. It seems that general consensus is:

In its current version, this library uses mask (interruptible) for allocation functions and uninterruptibleMask cleanup handlers. This is a debatable decision (and one worth debating!). An example of alternatives would be:

Naming of the synchronous monadic throwing function

We may decide to rename throw to something else at some point. Please see https://github.com/fpco/safe-exceptions/issues/4

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