mutable-lens: Interoperate mutable references with regular lens

Use mutable references as lens, compose them with other lens, and run them.

You may have heard of lens being described as "functional" or "first-class" references, with some nice properties such as composition. However the equivalence is more than just abstract - mutable references can be readily converted into lens form, interoperable with other pure lens. This makes use of the fact that "mutability" in a high-level language focusing on purity, is really just an alias for a pure state monad that is treated specially by the runtime system. A mutable reference over a value of type a with world state of type s, *is* therefore an actual Lens s s a a. There is no need for handwaving or connotative language, the isomorphism is direct and concrete.

This package demonstrates this isomorphism, converting between the two forms. You then have access to the whole of the lens ecosystem and its compositional properties, and use them with mutable references without other special-cased shims or mutable-specific abstractions.

Uniformity of API is another major benefit - if you want to switch to a different reference type, you only have to change your type definitions and imports, you don't have to change all readSomeVar to readOtherVar, writeSomeVar to writeOtherVar, or was it putOtherVar, and does the atomicModifyVar function take a s -> (a, s) or a s -> (s, a) again?

On the other hand, this package has not been optimised for performance, and currently only supports GHC. We would certainly welcome contributions in these areas, if you are interested in running this code in production. Until that happens, please be cautious and treat this code as experimental.

For what it's worth, the API is likely to be very stable: an isomorphism to another well-established library, is not a complex API.

See unit tests for example usage, e.g. MutableTest

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Flags

Manual Flags

Name	Description	Default
dev	Set compile flags for development	Disabled

Use -f <flag> to enable a flag, or -f -<flag> to disable that flag. More info

Downloads

• mutable-lens-0.4.0.0.tar.gz [browse] (Cabal source package)
• Package description (as included in the package)

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• infinity0

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Candidates

• 0.4.1.0