rileyapeldoorn/iom

Dumb monad shit in Rust

IOM

IO Monad for Rust, because why not.

Why

Idk I got sidetracked while working on a project and I thought it was funny.

Also it makes my last two evenings feel like less of a waste if I put this online.

iom's Issues

Basic primitives

• Files
• Network sockets

Do-notation macro

Types like Option and Result support the ? operator, and Futures can be awaited. IO can make use of neither of those and needs some other way to make the code using it even remotely readable. For this, we'll replicate Haskell's do-notation sugar using a macro. It allows programmers to work with monads without littering the code with the bind operator.

Since do is a reserved keyword, an appropriate second best option is io!. It's also more explicit about only handling IO and not arbitrary monads.

It should look somewhat like this:

let x: IO<'_> = io! {
    contents <- read_to_string("test.txt");
    println(contents)
};

The above code gets translated to:

let x: IO<'_> = read_to_string("test.txt").bind(|contents| {
    println(contents)
});

Perhaps it is also useful to allow let bindings. In that case there would be three kinds of statements:

1. "Unwrapping" statements (backwards arrow, output is bound to the (irrefutable) pattern on the left)
2. "Executing" statements (no arrow, output is ignored)
3. Let-binding statements

Every line in a block, except for the last, must be semicolon-terminated.

The last expression of the block must be the expected type for the whole block. If desired, the return keyword can be overloaded in the last expression to mean pure, but without the function call parenthesis. For example:

io! {
    return "hello"
}

would be the same as:

pure("hello")

Since this seems pretty ungodly to do with declarative macros, it might be nice to put this behind a feature flag since it will introduce dependencies.

I hate this