What does Free buy us?

Let’s talk about free monads.

Why are they free? Do monads ordinarily cost us something?

The category theory intuition for “free” roughly expands to:

This structure gives you a free X when given a Y

So, when we talk about the typical free monad type:

data Free f a = Pure a | Free ( f ( Free f a ))

this really expands to:

This structure gives you a free monad for a given functor

This expansion is witnessed by the instance:

instance ( Functor f ) => Monad ( Free f ) where return = Pure Pure a >>= k = k a Free m >>= k = Free (( >>= k ) <$> m )

The instance says: “If your f is a Functor , then a Free f is a Monad .” The exact implementation is less important.

Free Monoids

We say that “List is the free monoid.” What we mean is that:

This structure gives you a free monoid for a given type.

So we can equip any value with list and it becomes a monoid, for free. This expansion is witnessed by the instance:

instance Monoid [ a ] where mempty = [] mappend xs ys = xs ++ ys

Are there other free monoids? Yes!

We have a free monoid for a given semigroup. This is the more moral instance of Monoid for Maybe :

instance ( Semigroup a ) => Monoid ( Maybe a ) where mempty = Nothing mappend ( Just a ) ( Just b ) = Just ( a <> b ) mappend Nothing ( Just b ) = Just b mappend ( Just a ) Nothing = Just a mappend Nothing Nothing = Nothing -- where `<>` comes from Data.Semigroup

What’s the point?

Great question! What do these constructs buy us? What is the alternative to using Free ’s Monad instance for a given Functor ?

The common motivation for Free is writing a data structure that we can build up specialized programs in, and then vary the interpretation. So let’s do this without free. We’ve been tasked with writing our billing logic system for our SaaS billing system. We’re going to construct a data type that represents a program where we check a user’s balance and either charge them, notify them, or cancel their subscriptions based on various factors. We absolutely need to get this right, so we’re doing this weird heavy weight technique to improve our confidence in it’s correctness.

Sum Commands

First, we need to represent the various things we want to do:

data BillingProgram = GetUserBalance | GetUserLastPaymentDate | CancelSubscription | ChargeUser | SendLateNotice

These are the commands we need to do:

We need a way to get the user’s current account balance. We need a way to get the user’s last successful payment date. We need a way to cancel a user’s subscription. We need to be able to charge the user. We need to be able to send the user a late notice.

This data type is a sum type that represents the possible commands we can issue to the system. Now, we can construct “programs” using just this type! Here is a basic interpreter for this data type:

data BillingState = BillingState { userId :: UserId , userBalance :: Double , userSubscription :: SubscriptionId , lastPaymentDate :: Day } interpret :: BillingProgram -> StateT BillingState IO () interpret GetUserBalance = do id <- gets userId balance <- liftIO $ Stripe . getUserBalance id modify ( \ s -> s { userBalance = balance }) interpret GetUserLastPaymentDate = -- etc...

We can have our logic construct a [BillingProgram] value, and then use mapM_ interpret over that. However, this is really inflexible. We’re required to store every bit of state in the interpreter, as well as the current user and subscription that we’re working on. Let’s delegate some of that work to our command type.

In a sense, this is sort of like the code we might write in a highly stateful, imperative OOP context:

class BillingProgram { private UserId userId ; private double userBalance ; private SubscriptionId userSubscription ; private Day lastPaymentDate ; public BillingProgram ( UserId u ) { /* etc... */ } public void runLogic () { getUserBalance (); if ( this . userBalance > 100 ) { chargeUser (); } else { sendBalanceNotice (); } } }

The command data type has no way of communicating arguments, and it has no way of communicating a return value. This is no fun.

Commands, with info!

We want our commands to contain the information they need in order to be able to do work. Rather than a simple signal to our interpreter on what action to take, we’ll also include the parameters that we wish to act on.

data BillingProgram = GetUserBalance UserId | GetUserLastPaymentDate UserId | CancelSubscription UserId PlanId | ChargeUser UserId Double | SendLateNotice PlanId Email

Now, we’ve augmented our data type. Interpreting this has become a lot easier – we no longer need to carry the user ID in the state, or the last payment date. These are just things we can interpret and request.

interpret :: BillingProgram -> IO () interpret ( GetUserBalance userId ) = Stripe . getUserBalance userId interpret ( GetUserLastPaymentDate userId ) = Stripe . getLastPaymentDate userId interpret ( CancelSubscription userId planId ) = do subscriptions <- Stripe . getSubscriptionsFor userId for_ subscriptions $ \ sub -> do when ( sunPlan sun == planId ) $ do Stripe . cancelSubscription ( subId sub ) -- etc...

This implementation is pretty clean. Just like the previous type, we can have our logic functions create a list of these commands, and we can use mapM_ interpret to interpret them meaningfully.

However, we have a problem: the two commands GetUserBalance and GetUserLastPaymentDate are queries. These queries have a meaningful return value. And we don’t have a way to vary behavior. The interpret function won’t type check: Stripe.getUserBalance doesn’t return () , it returns a Double that we want to use!

So, we have two choices:

Refactor the data type to not have queries. Refactor the data type to be able to use queries.

Let’s explore #1 first.

No Queries No Masters

So, we can’t have queries in our data type. That means we need to factor all of the logic that we’d do on those queries into the individual commands.

data BillingProgram = CancelSubscriptionIfUserPaymentTooOld UserId SubscriptionId | IfBalanceGreatEnoughThenChargeUserElseSendNotice UserId SubscriptionId Email

Ugh. Let’s write the interpreter:

interpret :: BillingProgram -> IO () interpret ( CancelSubscriptionIfUserPaymentTooOld userId subscriptionId ) = do date <- Stripe . getLastPaymentDate userId now <- getCurrentTime when ( now ` diffTime ` date > days 60 ) $ do Stripe . cancelSubscription userId subscriptionId interpret ( IfBalanceGreatEnoughThenChargeUserElseSendNotice userId subscriptionId email ) = do balance <- Stripe . getUserBalance userId subscription <- Stripe . getSubscriptions subscriptionId if balance > subPrice subscription then Stripe . chargeUser userId ( subPrice subscription ) else Email . sendBalanceNotice email subscription

Ugh! This is horrible. OK, this approach was a mistake. Let’s try refactoring the data type to be able to use queries.

The question of next

A query is “something that informs what we might want to do next.” But our command data type doesn’t have any concept of “next” or “previous,” only “now”: Charge the user money! Send a billing email!

We’d previously used lists to have a sequence of commands, and we’d execute each of them individually. Lists are a fine way to express iteration and sequencing, but they don’t allow previous commands to affect future commands. So, if we want to incorporate the idea of “next” into our data type, then we can’t use lists. We have to make it part of the type.

We’ll include another field on each command: this will have the BillingProgram to execute after the current program.

data BillingProgram = GetUserBalance UserId BillingProgram | GetUserLastPaymentDate UserId BillingProgram | CancelSubscription UserId PlanId BillingProgram | ChargeUser UserId Double BillingProgram | SendLateNotice PlanId Email BillingProgram

Now, these commands all have a way of expressing “Once you’re done with this command, here’s the next command you’ll want to execute.” However, we’re still not using the information from the UserBalance and LastPaymentDate commands. We can express that as a function where the construction of the next BillingProgram depends on the value that the interpreter returns.

data BillingProgram = GetUserBalance UserId ( Double -> BillingProgram ) | GetUserLastPaymentDate UserId ( Day -> BillingProgram ) | CancelSubscription UserId PlanId BillingProgram | ChargeUser UserId Double BillingProgram | SendLateNotice PlanId Email BillingProgram

That does it! Now, we can express complex logic in our billing program. Let’s construct our billing program that expresses “If the user has enough balance, then charge them, otherwise send a balance notice.”

chargeOrEmail :: User -> Subscription -> BillingProgram chargeOrEmail user sub = GetUserBalance ( userId user ) $ \ userBalance -> if userBalance >= subPrice sub then ChargeUser ( userId user ) ( subPrice sub ) ??? else SendLateNotice ( subPlan sub ) ( userEmail user ) ???

Errr, this doesn’t quite work. We need something in our command data type to indicate “This program is complete.” Let’s add that constructor:

data BillingProgram = GetUserBalance UserId ( Double -> BillingProgram ) | GetUserLastPaymentDate UserId ( Day -> BillingProgram ) | CancelSubscription UserId PlanId BillingProgram | ChargeUser UserId Double BillingProgram | SendLateNotice PlanId Email BillingProgram | Done

The Done constructor is the only constructor that doesn’t contain a BillingProgram , which means that every BillingProgram must end with a Done (or loop infinitely). Alright, we can finish our program now:

chargeOrEmail :: User -> Subscription -> BillingProgram chargeOrEmail user sub = GetUserBalance ( userId user ) $ \ userBalance -> if userBalance >= subPrice sub then ChargeUser ( userId user ) ( subPrice sub ) Done else SendLateNotice ( subPlan sub ) ( userEmail user ) Done

Meaningful return values

But, hmm, what if we want to report on whether or not we could successfully bill the user? The command data type has no way of “returning” a value. That’s kind of unfortunate. We can change the Done constructor to take a value, but we don’t want to constrain the type of the value – we could potentially return all kinds of things! That means we need to add a type variable to the command data type:

data BillingProgram ret = GetUserBalance UserId ( Double -> BillingProgram ret ) | GetUserLastPaymentDate UserId ( Day -> BillingProgram ret ) | CancelSubscription UserId PlanId ( BillingProgram ret ) | ChargeUser UserId Double ( BillingProgram ret ) | SendLateNotice PlanId Email ( BillingProgram ret ) | Done ret

Alright, now we can rewrite our program to return whether or not we successfully billed the customer:

chargeOrEmail :: User -> Subscription -> BillingProgram Bool chargeOrEmail user sub = GetUserBalance ( userId user ) $ \ userBalance -> if userBalance >= subPrice sub then ChargeUser ( userId user ) ( subPrice sub ) ( Done True ) else SendLateNotice ( subPlan sub ) ( userEmail user ) ( Done False )

Very cool. We’re starting to have a reasonably fully featured language for billing our customers. However, we don’t have any tools for taking an existing program and extending it, or composing it with another one.

Extending programs

So, we want to extend a preexisting program. What does it mean to extend a program? To me, that suggests that we’ll start running a new program with the output of the old program. In order to get the output of the old program, we need to run it until we get to a Done constructor. Then, we can use the value from Done to continue the program. We’ll start with the Done case:

andThen :: BillingProgram a -> ( a -> BillingProgram b ) -> BillingProgram b andThen ( Done ret ) mkProgram = mkProgram ret

We take the return value from the previous program, and use it to construct the next bit of the program. Now, we just need to plumb this through the other constructors:

andThen ( GetUserBalance userId next ) mkProgram = GetUserBalance userId ( \ balance -> andThen ( next balance ) mkProgram ) andThen ( GetUserLastPaymentDate userId next ) mkProgram = GetUserLastPaymentDate userId ( \ date -> andThen ( next date ) mkProgram ) andThen ( CancelSubscription userId planId next ) = CancelSubscription userId planId ( andThen next mkProgram ) andThen ( ChargeUser userId amount next ) = ChargeUser userId amount ( andThen next mkProgram ) andThen ( SendLateNotice planId email next ) = SendLateNotice planId notice ( andThen next mkProgram )

We want to not change the existing command structure. The only thing we do here is use andThen to recursively walk the program until we hit Done , at which point we extend the program with the new program using the output of the old program.

huh

that looks familiar

Let’s write a non-trivial program that uses these commands:

billingProgram :: User -> [ Subscription ] -> BillingProgram () billingProgram _ [] = Done () billingProgram user ( sub : subs ) = GetUserBalance uid $ \ balance -> if balance > price then ChargeUser uid price theRest else SendLateNotice plan ( userEmail user ) $ GetUserLastPaymentDate uid $ \ day -> if day < 60 daysago then CancelSubscription uid plan theRest else theRest where uid = userId user price = subPrice sub plan = subPlan sub theRest = billingProgram user subs

This is super clumsy and ugly to write. We have to manually iterate over the list, and we have these weird uppercase constructors everywhere. We need to manually handle lambda scopes and other such nonsense.

Let’s factor out some of the common patterns here, and use the andThen function we wrote earlier to build programs rather than manually grafting this stuff together.

getUserBalance :: UserId -> BillingProgram Double getUserBalance userId = GetUserBalance userId ( \ amount -> Done amount ) end :: BillingProgram () end = Done () getLastPaymentDate :: UserId -> BillingProgram Day getLastPaymentDate userId = GetUserLastPaymentDate userId ( \ day -> Done day ) cancelSubscription :: UserId -> PlanId -> BillingProgram () cancelSubscription userId planId = CancelSubscription userId planId end -- etc, this gets pretty repetitive

Alright, let’s use these and the andThen to write the above logic out:

billingProgram :: User -> [ Subscription ] -> BillingProgram () billingProgram _ [] = end billingProgram user ( sub : subs ) = getUserBalance uid ` andThen ` \ balance -> if balance > price then chargeUser uid price ` andThen ` \ _ -> theRest else sendLateNotice plan ( userEmail user ) ` andThen ` \ _ -> getUserLastPaymentDate uid ` andThen ` \ day -> if day < 60 daysago then cancelSubscription uid plan ` andThen ` \ _ -> theRest else theRest where uid = userId user price = subPrice sub plan = subPlan sub theRest = billingProgram user subs

This looks quite a bit nicer!

ah yes, i’ve seen this before

This is strongly reminding me of Monad at this point. Let’s write an instance of Monad for our type:

instance Monad BillingProgram where return = Done ( >>= ) = andThen

Huh. That was easy.

Now we can take advantage of do notation and all the functions that are generic over the monad. I’m specifically thinking of these friends:

forM_ :: ( Monad m ) => [ a ] -> ( a -> m b ) -> m () when :: ( Monad m ) => Bool -> m () -> m ()

Let’s rewrite our program with this new fanciness:

billingProgram :: User -> [ Subscription ] -> BillingProgram () billingProgram user subs = forM_ subs $ \ sub -> do let uid = userId user price = subPrice sub plan = subPlan sub balance <- getUserBalance uid if balance > price then do chargeUser uid price else do day <- getUserLastPaymentDate uid when ( day < 60 daysago ) $ do cancelSubscription uid plan

Now this is some nice, readable, and idiomatic code. We’ve used the Monad instance to get sweet, sweet do notation. We haven’t tried to interpret it, yet – is this going to suck?

interpreting the monad

It’s fairly straightforward. Let’s do a Stripe interpreter:

interpret :: BillingProgram a -> IO a interpret ( Done a ) = pure a interpret ( ChargeUser uid price next ) = do Stripe . chargeUser uid price interpret next interpret ( SendLateNotice plan email next ) = do Email . sendLateNoticeFor plan email interpret next interpret ( GetUserBalance uid next ) = do balance <- Stripe . getBalance uid interpret ( next balance ) interpret etcccc = do putStrLn "you could finish me"

This interpreter just walks down the command tree. It interprets the command, and then calls the interpreter on the next command recursively. Where the next command is a function, we first acquire the value, pass it to the function to generate the next command, and the interpret the result.

Can we write a test interpreter? Yes!

interpretTest :: BillingProgram a -> State Mock a interpretTest ( Done a ) = pure a interpretTest ( ChargeUser uid price next ) = do modify ( subtractBalance uid price ) interpret next interpretTest ( SendLateNotice plan email next ) = do modify ( addBillingEmail plan email ) interpret next interpretTest ( GetUserBalance uid next ) = do balance <- gets ( userBalance uid ) interpret ( next balance ) interpretTest etc = error "finish meeee"

This one doesn’t use any IO. It operates in the State monad, so we can keep it entirely pure. We can provide an initial Mock state and then make assertions on what the Mock looks like after we run a program. This lets us write tests without needing to mock out any IO or anything else nasty.

what have we done?!

You might be satisfied to stop here. We’ve accomplished a lot, after all!

You might think:

Dang, that was a lot of boilerplate. There was a lot of repetition in the definition of andThen , and the definition of the interpreter seemed awfully repetitive as well. What if I write another EDSL (embedded domain specific language)? Will I have to write all this boilerplate again?

Let’s go deeper.

Let’s write another data type for an EDSL. This one describes a terminal interaction:

data Terminal a = GetLine ( String -> Terminal a ) | Done a | PrintLine String ( Terminal a ) instance Monad Terminal where return = Done t >>= mk = case t of GetLine next -> GetLine $ \ s -> next s >>= mk PrintLine str next -> PrintLine str ( next >>= mk ) Done a -> mk a interpret :: Terminal a -> IO a interpret ( Done a ) = pure a interpret ( GetLine next ) = do str <- getLine interpret ( next str ) interpret ( PrintLine str next ) = do putStrLn str interpret next

There’s definitely a fair amount of boilerplate here. The structure is very similar. Let’s look at these two types and see what we can factor out:

data Terminal a = GetLine ( String -> Terminal a ) | PrintLine String ( Terminal a ) | Done a data BillingProgram ret = GetUserBalance UserId ( Double -> BillingProgram ret ) | GetUserLastPaymentDate UserId ( Day -> BillingProgram ret ) | CancelSubscription UserId PlanId ( BillingProgram ret ) | ChargeUser UserId Double ( BillingProgram ret ) | SendLateNotice PlanId Email ( BillingProgram ret ) | Done ret

Both of these types have a Done constructor, so we should be able to factor that out. Both of these types are also recursive, so we should be able to factor the recursion out.

That means our type should have two components:

Factored out recursion (aka, Fix ) A Done constructor.

data Free f a = Free ( f ( Free f a )) | Done a

This actually looks really similar to a list, except the recursion has an intermediate step, the Free doesn’t take a value, and the Done constructor takes a value. Let’s lay them side by side:

data Free f a = Free ( f ( Free f a )) | Done a data List a = Cons a ( List a ) | Nil

In fact, Free is more general than list! We can recover singly linked lists by providing an appropriate f and a , specifically, (,) n and () :

type List a = Free ((,) a ) () totallyAList :: List Int totallyAList = Free ( 1 , Free ( 2 , Free ( 3 , Done () )))

Anyway, back to stuff people actually care about.

Now that we’ve factored out the common stuff between our two program types, let’s get some common machinery between them:

data TerminalF next = GetLine ( String -> next ) | PrintLine String next type Terminal = Free TerminalF getLine :: Terminal String getLine = Free ( GetLine ( \ str -> Done str )) printLine :: String -> Terminal () printLine str = Free ( PrintLine str ( Done () ))

The new command data type only has the commands we care about. We replace the explicit recursion with a next type variable, which the Free type fills in.

data BillingF next = GetUserBalance UserId ( Double -> next ) | ChargeUser UserId Double next | etc you get it type Billing = Free BillingF getUserBalance :: UserId -> Billing Double getUserBalance userId = Free ( GetUserBalance userId Done ) chargeUser :: UserId -> Double -> Billing () chargeUser uid amt = Free ( ChargeUser uid amt ( Done () ))

Same – the new command data type doesn’t have to worry about Done , or anything else. Because Free has an instance of Monad for any Functor , we only have to write a Functor instance to make this work.

I lied.

We don’t even have to write that instance.

We just have to ask for it!

{-# LANGUAGE DeriveFunctor #-} data TerminalF next = GetLine ( String -> next ) | PrintLine String next deriving Functor

Haskell lets us derive Functor for types where it can figure it out.

So, the free monad instance makes it easy to write programs, but does it make interpreters easy? Yes!

We can define this function:

foldFree :: ( Functor f , Monad m ) => ( forall a . f a -> m a ) -> Free f a -> m a foldFree morph ( Done a ) = return a foldFree morph ( Free f ) = do a <- morph f foldFree morph a

This reads as:

Give me a way to interpret your commands into some monad. Then give me a program built of these commands. I’ll interpret all of the commmands for you.

So we can write our terminal program as:

data TerminalF next = GetLine ( String -> next ) | PrintLine String next deriving Functor type Terminal = Free TerminalF interpret :: Terminal a -> IO a interpret = foldFree morph where morph :: TermF a -> IO a morph ( GetLine next ) = next <$> getLine morph ( PrintLine s n ) = do putStrLn s pure n

Note the really interesting bit of this interpreter – we don’t have to specify any recursion, at all. foldFree handles all of that for us. We just need to specify the bits that should happen at each step of the recursion.

Wrap it up

We’ve implemented a data type to represent a primitive set of commands. We’ve then extended those commands with arguments, which allowed us to shift complexity from the interpreter into the commands themselves. Then, we factored the question of “what to do next” from the list data structure into the command data type. This increased the complexity of both the data type and the interpreter. However, we were able to get a Monad instance for our programs, which gave us a lot of awesome flexibility for writing the EDSLs.

To tame that complexity, we factored the “what to do next” back out into a new data type, this time called Free instead of List . Free and List are similar; and we can use Free to write List and other interesting data structures. The only requirement that Free has to give a monad to the whole type is that the f type parameter be a Functor .

I did a similar dive into recursive types in Recursion Excursion, which you may find interesting.