Tagless Final algebras and Streaming

There have been a couple of really nice blog posts about Tagless Final and some related topics. However, I have faced some design problems when writing some algebras and haven’t seen anybody talking about. So please let me introduce this problem to you.

Algebra definition

Given the following data definition:

case class ItemName ( value : String ) extends AnyVal case class Item ( name : ItemName , price : BigDecimal )

Consider the following algebra:

trait ItemRepository [ F [ _ ]] { def findAll : F [ List [ Item ]] def find ( name : ItemName ) : F [ Option [ Item ]] def save ( item : Item ) : F [ Unit ] def remove ( name : ItemName ) : F [ Unit ] }

Let’s go through each method’s definition:

findAll needs to return many Items, obtainable inside a context: F[List[Item]] .

needs to return many Items, obtainable inside a context: . find might or might not return an Item inside a context: F[Option[Item]] .

might or might not return an Item inside a context: . save and remove will perform some actions without returning any actual value: F[Unit] .

Everything is clear and you might have seen this kind of pattern before, so let’s create an interpreter for it:

import doobie.implicits._ import doobie.util.transactor.Transactor import cats.effect.Sync // Doobie implementation (not fully implemented, what matters here are the types). class PostgreSQLItemRepository [ F [ _ ]]( xa : Transactor [ F ]) ( implicit F : Sync [ F ]) extends ItemRepository [ F ] { override def findAll : F [ List [ Item ]] = sql "select name, price from items" . query [ Item ] . to [ List ] . transact ( xa ) override def find ( name : ItemName ) : F [ Option [ Item ]] = F . pure ( None ) override def save ( item : Item ) : F [ Unit ] = F . unit override def remove ( name : ItemName ) : F [ Unit ] = F . unit }

Here we are using Doobie, defined as A principled JDBC layer for Scala and one of the most popular DB libraries in the Typelevel ecosystem. And it comes with one super powerful feature: it supports Streaming results, since it’s built on top of fs2.

Now it could be very common to have a huge amount of Item s in our DB that a List will not fit into memory and / or it will be a very expensive operation. So we might want to stream the results of findAll instead of have them all in memory on a List , making Doobie a great candidate for the job. But wait… We have a problem now. Our ItemRepository algebra has fixed the definition of findAll as F[List[Item]] so we won’t be able to create an interpreter that returns a streaming result instead.

Rethinking our algebra

We should think about abstracting over that List and two of the most common abstractions that immediately come to mind are Foldable and Traverse . But although these typeclasses are very useful, they are not enough to represent a stream of values, so we should come up with a better abstraction.

Well, it seems that our options are either adding another higher-kinded parameter G[_] to our algebra or just define an abstract member G[_] . So let’s go with the first one:

trait ItemRepository [ F [ _ ] , G [ _ ]] { def findAll : G [ Item ] def find ( name : ItemName ) : F [ Option [ Item ]] def save ( item : Item ) : F [ Unit ] def remove ( name : ItemName ) : F [ Unit ] }

Great! This looks good so far.

Streaming support interpreter

Now let’s write a new PostgreSQL interpreter with streaming support:

import doobie.implicits._ import doobie.util.transactor.Transactor import fs2.Stream // Doobie implementation (not fully implemented, what matters here are the types). class StreamingItemRepository [ F [ _ ]]( xa : Transactor [ F ]) ( implicit F : Sync [ F ]) extends ItemRepository [ F , Stream [ F , ? ]] { override def findAll : Stream [ F , Item ] = sql "select name, price from items" . query [ Item ] . stream . transact ( xa ) override def find ( name : ItemName ) : F [ Option [ Item ]] = F . pure ( None ) override def save ( item : Item ) : F [ Unit ] = F . delay ( println ( s "Saving item: $item" )) override def remove ( name : ItemName ) : F [ Unit ] = F . delay ( println ( s "Removing item: $item" )) }

Voilà! We got our streaming implementation of findAll .

Test interpreter

That’s all we wanted, but what about testing it? Sure, we might prefer to have a simple implementation by just using a plain List , so what can we possibly do?

object MemRepository extends ItemRepository [ Id , List ] { private val mem = MutableMap . empty [ String , Item ] override def findAll : List [ Item ] = mem . headOption . map ( _ . _2 ). toList override def find ( name : ItemName ) : Id [ Option [ Item ]] = mem . get ( name . value ) override def save ( item : Item ) : Id [ Unit ] = mem . update ( item . name . value , item ) override def remove ( name : ItemName ) : Id [ Unit ] = { mem . remove ( name . value ) () } }

That’s pretty much it! We managed to abstract over the return type of findAll by just adding an extra parameter to our algebra.

About composition

At this point the avid reader might have thought, what if I want to write a generic function that takes all the items (using findAll ), applies some discounts and writes them back to the DB (using save )?

Short answer is, you might want to define a different algebra where findAll and save have the same types (eg: both of them are streams) but in case you find yourself wanting to make this work with the current types then let’s try and find out!

class DiscountProcessor [ F [ _ ] , G [ _ ] : Functor ]( repo : ItemRepository [ F , G ], join : G [ F [ Unit ]] => F [ Unit ]) { def process ( discount : Double ) : F [ Unit ] = { val items : G [ Item ] = repo . findAll . map ( item => item . copy ( price = item . price * ( 1 - discount ))) val saved : G [ F [ Unit ]] = items . map ( repo . save ) join ( saved ) } }

We defined a join function responsible for evaluating the effects and flatten the result to F[Unit] . As you can see below, this works for both a streaming interpreter and a list interpreter (shout out to fthomas for proposing this solution):

object StreamingDiscountInterpreter { private val join : Stream [ IO , IO [ Unit ]] => IO [ Unit ] = _ . evalMap ( identity ). compile . drain def apply ( repo : ItemRepository [ IO , Stream [ IO , ? ]]) : DiscountProcessor [ IO , Stream [ IO , ? ]] = new DiscountProcessor [ IO , Stream [ IO , ? ]]( repo , join ) } object ListDiscountInterpreter { private val join : List [ IO [ Unit ]] => IO [ Unit ] = list => Traverse [ List ]. sequence ( list ). void def apply ( repo : ItemRepository [ IO , List ]) : DiscountProcessor [ IO , List ] = new DiscountProcessor [ IO , List ]( repo , join ) }

While in this case it was possible to make it generic I don’t recommend to do this at home because:

it involves some extra boilerplate and the code becomes harder to understand / maintain. as soon as the logic gets more complicated you might run out of options to make it work in a generic way. you lose the ability to use the fs2 DSL which is super convenient.

What I recommend instead, is to write this kind of logic in the streaming interpreter itself. You could also write a generic program that implements the parts that can be abstracted (eg. applying a discount to an item f: Item => Item ) and leave the other parts to the interpreter.

Design alternative

Another possible and very interesting alternative suggested by Michael Pilquist, would be to define our repository as follows:

trait ItemRepository [ F [ _ ] , S [ _ [ _ ] , _ ]] { def findAll : S [ F , Item ] }

Where the second type parameter matches the shape of fs2.Stream . In this case our streaming repository will remain the same (it should just extend ItemRepository[F, Stream] instead of ItemRepository[F, Stream[F, ?]] ) but our in memory interpreter will now rely on fs2.Stream instead of a parametric G[_] , for example:

object MemRepositoryAlt extends ItemRepository [ Id , Stream ] { override def findAll : Stream [ Id , Item ] = { sql "select name, price from items" . query [ Item ] . stream . transact ( xa ) } }

I think it’s an alternative worth exploring further that might require a blog post on its own, so I’ll leave it here for reference :)

Source of inspiration

I’ve come up with most of the ideas presented here during my work on Fs2 Rabbit, a stream based client for Rabbit MQ , where I make heavy use of this technique as I originally described in this blog post.

Another great source of inspiration was this talk given by Luka Jacobowitz at Scale by the Bay.

Abstracting over the effect type

One thing you might have noticed in the examples above is that both ItemRepository interpreters are not fixed to IO or Task or any other effect type but rather requiring a parametric F[_] and an implicit instance of Sync[F] . This is a quite powerful technique for both library authors and application developers. Well know libraries such as Http4s, Monix and Fs2 make a heavy use of it.

And by requiring a Sync[F] instance we are just saying that our implementation will need to suspend synchronous side effects.

Once at the edge of our program, commonly the main method, we can give F[_] a concrete type. At the moment, there are two options: cats.effect.IO and monix.eval.Task . But hopefully soon we’ll have a Scalaz 8 IO implementation as well (fingers crossed).

Principle of least power

Abstracting over the effect type doesn’t only mean that we should require Sync[F] , Async[F] or Effect[F] . It also means that we should only require the minimal typeclass instance that satisfies our predicate. For example:

import cats.Functor import cats.implicits._ def bar [ F [ _ ] : Applicative ] : F [ Int ] = 1. pure [ F ] def foo [ F [ _ ] : Functor ]( fa : F [ Int ]) : F [ String ] = fa . map ( _ . toString )

Here our bar method just returns a pure value in the F context, thus we need an Applicative[F] instance that defines pure . On the other hand, our foo method just converts the inner Int into String , what we call a pure data transformation. So all we need here is a Functor[F] instance. Another example:

import cats.Monad def fp [ F [ _ ] : Monad ] : F [ String ] = ` for { a <- bar [ F ] b <- bar [ F ] } yield a + b

The above implementation makes use of a for-comprehension which is a syntactic sugar for flatMap and map , so all we need is a Monad[F] instance because we also need an Applicative[F] instance for bar , otherwise we could just use a FlatMap[F] instance.

Final thoughts

I think we got quite far with all these abstractions, giving us the chance to write clean and elegant code in a pure functional programming style, and there’s even more! Other topics worth mentioning that might require a blog post on their own are:

Dependency Injection Tagless Final + implicits (MTL style) enables DI in an elegant way.

Algebras Composition It is very common to have multiple algebras with a different F[_] implementation. In some cases, FunctionK (a.k.a. natural transformation) can be the solution.



What do you think about it? Have you come across a similar design problem? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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