Editor's note. I've toned down some of the rhetoric in this post. The original title was "monad-control is unsound".

MonadBaseControl and MonadTransControl, from the monad-control package, specify an appealing way to automatically lift functions in IO that take "callbacks" to arbitrary monad stacks based on IO. Their appeal comes from the fact that they seem to offer a more general mechanism than the alternative: picking some functions, lifting them, and then manually reimplementing generic versions of all the functions built on top of them.

Unfortunately, monad-control has rather surprising behavior for many functions you might lift.

For example, it doesn't work on functions which invoke the callback multiple times:

{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleContexts #-} import Control.Monad.Trans.Control import Control.Monad.State double :: IO a -> IO a double m = m >> m doubleG :: MonadBaseControl IO m => m a -> m a doubleG = liftBaseOp_ double incState :: MonadState Int m => m () incState = get >>= \x -> put (x + 1) main = execStateT (doubleG (incState)) 0 >>= print

The result is 1 , rather than 2 that we would expect. If you are unconvinced, suppose that the signature of double was Identity a -> Identity a , e.g. a -> a . There is only one possible implementation of this signature: id . It should be obvious what happens, in this case.

If you look closely at the types involved in MonadBaseControl, the reason behind this should become obvious: we rely on the polymorphism of a function we would like to lift in order to pass StM m around, which is the encapsulated “state” of the monad transformers. If this return value is discarded by IO , as it is in our function double , there is no way to recover that state. (This is even alluded to in the liftBaseDiscard function!)

My conclusion is that, while monad-control may be a convenient implementation mechanism for lifted versions of functions, the functions it exports suffer from serious semantic incoherency. End-users, take heed!

Postscript. A similar injunction holds for the previous versions of MonadBaseControl/MonadTransControl, which went by the names MonadPeel and MonadMorphIO.