tl;dr

Task is actually a form of IO. Like Fluture's Future, this makes Task lazy, but unlike Future, IO is never meant to be invoked directly.

Contents

• Future Rocks
• Type Safety
• fork is Missing
  • What is Invocation
  • Advantage of Laziness
  • Short Circuit Evaluation
  • What is fork
  • Why is it Missing
  • What is IO
  • Wait What
  • Forgetting to Invoke IO
  • IO Entry Point
  • hyper-ts
  • redux-observable
• Conclusion

Future Rocks

Much like TaskEither, Fluture's Future is a fully monadic, lazy, asynchronous, failable operation. While TaskEither is obviously based on fp-ts, Future is based on the older fantasy land functional programming library.

Unlike Promise, Future has some important advantages over TaskEither - it's ensures error handling at compile time, it's able to cancel asynchronous operations, and it has a broader array of combinators.

So why would we ever use TaskEither? Is it getting warm in here? Is anyone else sweating?

This paper aims to prove that TaskEither is in fact more powerful than Future in two ways: purity and type-safety.

Type Safety

This argument in favor of TaskEither is the easiest to make. fp-ts was designed with Typescript in mind, whereas fantasy land was created before Typescript existed.

The crown jewel of fp-ts and what sets it apart from other fp libraries is its static higher kinded types. Fluture's author, Aldwin Vlasblom, discusses this in the issue tracker for fantasy land.

This means that it's not possible using fantasy land to ensure at compile time that any given typeclass instance properly conforms to its typeclass - monad, functor, applicative functor, any of them.

For example, we can be sure that TaskEither works with sequenceT, just like any other arbitrary Applicative implementation. In my eyes, this makes fp-ts a more powerful library than fantasy land, although fantasy land is a great solution for developers who aren't able to use Typescript.

There are other reasons fp-ts is more powerful - static combinators and tree shaking come to mind - but those are outside the scope of this article.

fork is Missing

This one is a bit trickier to explain. Earlier, I mentioned that Future ensures error handling at compile time. As we have seen in Should I Use fp-ts Task, TaskEither can make no such guarantees. So how is Future able to do this?

The answer is in Future's invocation function - fork, which accepts a handler for both the error case and the resolution case. Now let's back it up and see what all that actually means.

What is Invocation

Task is 'lazy' and it must be 'invoked' or else it won't run. Future is the same way. What does this mean?

Let's take a look at a type defintion for TaskEither:

type TaskEither<E, A> = () => Promise<Either<E, A>>

TaskEither is simply an anonymous function returning a Promise. When we call that function, we say that we have 'invoked' that Task.

const a: TaskEither<string, number> = () => Promise.resolve(E.right<string, number>(4))
a() // invoking 'a', causing the Promise to execute

Future is similar. Why would we do this?

Advantage of Laziness

Vlasblom said about laziness with regard to his Future:

This means is that whoever gave us a Future didn’t only give us control over what happens with the result of its operation, but also over if and when the operation will happen.

This enables us to have better reasoning about exactly when our asynchronous operations are performed.

Short Circuit Evaluation

Another advantage of laziness is something called 'short-circuit evaluation'.

You might already be familiar with this concept from boolean arithmetic:

const first = (): boolean => {console.log('first'); return true }
const second = (): boolean => {console.log('second'); return true }
if (first() || second()) {
  // output:
  // first
}

second() is never invoked, because the || (logical 'or') operator evaluates from left to right, and once it reaches a true value, it stops looking.

This is also relevant for the new nullish coalescing operator '??='

What does this have to do with laziness? Well, since they both return from an anonymous function, first and second are lazy values!

What if we wanted to execute several TaskEithers in sequence, and if any of them returns Left, stops evaluating the other TaskEithers?

import { flow } from 'fp-ts/function'
import { pipe } from "fp-ts/pipeable"
import * as A from 'fp-ts/Array'
import * as T from 'fp-ts/Task'
import * as E from 'fp-ts/Either'
import * as TE from 'fp-ts/TaskEither'

const delayPromise = (millis: number) =>
<V>(value: V): Promise<V> => new Promise(
    resolve => setTimeout(() => {
      console.log(`evaluating ${value}`)
      resolve(value)
    }, millis)
  )

const delayTask = (millis: number) =>
  <V>(value: V): TE.TaskEither<string, V> => TE.tryCatch(
    () => delayPromise(millis)(value),
    () => 'error',
  )

const completed = flow(
  A.map(String),
  ss => ss.join(),
  console.log,
)
const taskArray = [
  delayTask(1000)(1),
  delayTask(2000)(2),
  TE.left<string, number>('short circuit'),
  delayTask(3000)(3),
  delayTask(4000)(4),
]

const result: Promise<void> = pipe(
  taskArray,
  A.sequence(TE.taskEitherSeq),
  TE.map(completed),
  T.map(E.getOrElse(console.error)),
  invokeTask => invokeTask(),
)
// output:
// evaluating 1
// evaluating 2
// short circuit

What if we try to do the same thing with Promise.all?

const promArray = [
  delayPromise(1000)(1),
  delayPromise(2000)(2),
  Promise.reject('short circuit'),
  delayPromise(3000)(3),
  delayPromise(4000)(4),
]

const result: Promise<void> = Promise.all(promArray)
  .then(completed)
  .catch(console.error)
// output:
// short circuit
// evaluating 1
// evaluating 2
// evaluating 3
// evaluating 4

Every Promise is run. Promise is 'eagerly' evaluated (the opposite of 'lazy'), so they're all invoked when they're created inside promArray

To be honest, it's not an accurate comparison, since it's impossible to chain Promises in sequence without using then

If we want to invoke an Array of TaskEither in parallel, we just use the other monad instance for TaskEither like this: A.sequence(TE.taskEither). This will output

// evaluating 1
// evaluating 2
// evaluating 3
// evaluating 4
// short circuit

A.sequence(TE.taskEither) awaits the output of every TaskEither before coalescing their outputs, which is why it prints 'short circuit' after all the evaluation. This makes it closer to Promise.allSettled than Promise.all. I mention this to show that the lazy nature of TaskEither makes it simpler, more intuitive and more flexible than Promise.

Lazy evaluation as a whole is not without disadvantages. Here is a great video by tsoding showing how a traversal of a lazy linked list can become tricky and expensive. However, I argue that in the context of asynchronous operations, laziness is a benefit.

What is fork

We have a major problem with TaskEither. If we invoke a TaskEither directly, we're able to discard our error value without doing anything about it.

const a: TE.TaskEither<string, void> = TE.left('failure')
a()

Type signatures aside, this is no better than an unchecked exception, and we've discussed the problems with those. How can we ensure that we handle our errors at compile time?

The same problem is mentioned in Duncan McGregor's Failure is not and Option, in the context of functions that return an Either type:

We could return Either in these cases, but as the caller is not processing a return value, it is easy to ignore the error as well ... [this only works] for functions where the caller is relying on using the result.

Fluture solves this problem with fork. fork accepts two (curried) arguments - an error handler and a resolution handler. fork is powerful because it's the only way to invoke a Future - meaning that it's required at compile time to handle both the rejection and resolution cases.

import * as F from 'fluture'

const a: F.FutureInstance<string, number> = F.Future<string, number>(
  (reject, resolve) => {
    resolve(3)
    // return function is a callback invoked on cancellation
    return (): void => {}
  }
)
const invoked: F.Cancel = pipe(
  a,
  F.fork(
    (err: string) => `error: ${err}`
  )(
    (val: number) => `resolved: ${val}`
  ),
)

A similar idea was proposed as part of the Promise/A+ spec back when it was being decided upon.

Why is it Missing

TaskEither has no equivalent of fork. You must invoke it unsafely.

In my article Should I Use fp-ts Task, I propose a self-imposed 'rule' as a solution to the problem. But why don't we just make a pull request to fp-ts and add a fork operation to TaskEither?

Because Task is actually a kind of IO. Here's a quote from Giulio Canti's (the creator of fp-ts) Introduction to Functional Programming (english translation)

interface Task<A> extends IO<Promise<A>> {}

This is an interesting type definition of Task - it's actually a form of IO.

What is IO

As we can see from the table above, IO is

a synchronous computation with side effects

IO is fundamental concept to pure functional programming. It stands for Input and Output.

IO is defined in fp-ts like so:

type IO<A> = () => A

This is familiar! IO is just a lazy value. This is why Task is IO - Task is just a lazy promise.

The important thing about IO is that it wraps values obtained through 'side-effects' - meaning an effect that cannot be represented in the type system.

import * as IO from 'fp-ts/IO'

const getInput: (numLines: number): IO.IO<string> => ...
const printOutput: (lineBreaks: boolean): IO.IO<void> => ...

Referential transparency, an important asset for code, means that all possible outcomes of a function are represented in its type signature. This is the meaning of a pure function - a function that has no side effects unrepresented in its type signature.

In react, Component is called Pure if it's stateless - theoretically meaning there are no side effects to it's render logic. The JSX element it output was a pure function of it's input (props), and it given the same input it will always have the same output. The name Pure comes from this same idea of referential transparency. IO helps us maintain purity by representing a side-effect in the type system - it tells us exactly which parts of the program are impure, allowing us to keep a clear separation of the two.

IO is lazy for the reasons listed above - short-circuit evaluation and reasoning about when the operation is invoked, as well as a reason discussed in the previous post - it allows IO to nest (aka conform to the monad laws).

fp-ts has modules for the console and the browser canvas, that wrap effectful operations in IO. This is useful because once an IO value has been introduced, we always know that an effect has taken place beyond what our other types are able to represent. IO can be thought of as representing a change to the universe as a whole.

IO is valueable because it demarcates a value as having been the result of some side effect. This means that for IO to be useful, it can never be unwrapped (read: invoked).

Wait What

Hold up. Does this mean that we can't ever invoke Task? Strictly speaking, yes. The developer themself is never meant to invoke Task - the wrapper is too valuable. Having a value wrapped in Task ensures that we know that the value exists sometime in the future, and that we affected some kind of change on the outside world by the time we have it.

Rather than invoking Task, or any IO for that matter, we're meant to compress all of our IO down into one value and hand it off to an entry point that can handle it. I'll explain what this means in a minute, but for now, I feel like I should explain the big reason why we might want to avoid invoking IO. Purity's nice and all, but there's a killer feature here, hiding just under the surface.

Forgetting to Invoke IO

The major unaddressed problem in the room is this:

const onClick = (): Task<void> => pipe(
  fetchValue,
  T.map(E.fold(
    displayError,
    updateState,
  ))
)

Can you see the problem? It's a little hard to spot. We forgot to invoke Task!

Fluture's fork handles error cases at compile time, but doesn't do anything about this other huge problem - what if you forget to use fork at all?

We addressed this in Should I use fp-ts Task with a self-imposed 'rule' that we always explicitly type our invoked Task as Promise:

const onClick = (): Promise<void> => pipe(
  fetchValue,
  T.map(E.fold(
    displayError,
    updateState,
  )),
  invokeTask => invokeTask(),
)

But this is even easier to forget than fork. How can we solve this? And how are we meant to use IO if we can never invoke it? It turns out that these questions answer each other.

IO Entry Point

What we want is something like the haskell main entry point - a single entry point that evaluates a single IO value. Then, we can combine all of our IOs together (sequentially if we want - IO is a monad after all) and output them all from that point.

main :: IO ()
main = do putStrLn "What is 2 + 2?"
          x <- readLn
          if x == 4
              then putStrLn "You're right!"
              else putStrLn "You're wrong!"

(example stolen from Learn Haskell in 10 minutes)

This idea, originating from haskell, is common across pure functional languages. Purescript and Elm also have main, and Scala cats has IOApp which operates similarly.

Scala uses an interesting terminology - it's said that IO is not evaluated until the "end of the world". The metaphor being that our lazy evaluator procrastinates so bad that the only kind of event that could possibly cause it to run would be cataclysmic. The epitome of true laziness. Practically speaking, "the end of the world" happens when you run your program.

Here are a couple examples of IO entry points that work with fp-ts IO - hyper-ts on the backend and redux-observable on the frontend.

hyper-ts

hyper-ts is a library that allows type-safe connection handling for an express server. You can be sure at compile-time that you are responding to each request with a single response, with a parsed request body and with the head and body written in the correct order.

It's a remarkable library that prevents behavior that shouldn't be allowed in the first place and provides powerful integrations like runtime type validation out of the box.

The Middleware type is the core of the library. It's used to translate Connection values into the correct state.

export interface Middleware<I, O, E, A> {
  (c: Connection<I>): TE.TaskEither<E, [A, Connection<O>]>
}

The type is too complicated to go into, but notice that it's built around the TaskEither type. Naturally, Middleware has both fromTaskEither and fromIOEither functions (and ones for plain IO and Task as well) that upconvert from TaskEither and IOEither.

While a chain of Middlewares isn't exacly a single 'entry point' for the entire server, it is an 'entry point' for a single endpoint.

Notable fp blogger Tim Ecklund's hyper-ts is My Cyborg Brain has a detailed explanation and example application for hyper-ts, including a usage of the fromTaskEither function.

It's worth mentioning that if left unhandled, the error case in TaskEither is passed into the next function of the express route. This is standard default behavior for express applications. The error will be written to the client with the stack trace. The stack trace is not included in the production environment.

redux-observable

If you use react or vue.js, redux-observable can be a great IO entry point. The basic idea is very simple, though a little tricky to explain - every side effect in the app is represented as a sum type called an 'Action', and these 'Actions' are represented as an rxjs stream called an Observable.

Since an Observable represents a potentially infinite stream of asynchronous operations, Task can easily be converted into a stream. fp-ts-rxjs, a library created to bind rxjs and fp-ts together, has a function called fromTask, as well as a fromIO.

Check out my article Should I Use redux-observable? Also What is it? Also Let's be Honest what's Redux? for a thorough yet hopefully simple explanation with examples.

I also recommend using Observable if you need cancellation and you'd rather use TaskEither than Fluture (which I think you probably should)

Conclusion

This is the diciest topic yet. Properly using IO for Typescript is a tricky proposition, especially since it can feel unnecessary, even arbitrary.

When describing what a Functor is, tsoding made a great point about pure functional programming more broadly:

Rust developers like to unwrap everything ... they cannot work with values unless they unwrap them ... In haskell world, we inject functions into things, and modify them from within.

Properly using IO isn't about unwrapping it's value, it's about leaving the value where it is and changing it from within. It's a powerful paradigm shift, and one whose benefits we've explored.

Of course, it's not always worth the added complexity. Like with many of these articles about fp-ts, it ends up being a shade of grey in the end. And as usual, it's probably not worth retrofitting an entire existing application to use redux-observable if it doesn't already - the pros just don't outweigh the cons. And for a simple application, or one that just doesn't need streams, simply following some arbitrary rules for TaskEither can be plenty.

There's a great discussion in the fp-ts issue tracker that brings up the topic of 'bubbles of purity'. I'll quote Toni Ruottu's comment in its entirety:

Essentially, what you have at the moment is a tiny bit of functional code inside an imperative React app. There is strictly speaking nothing wrong about that. It just means you are using fp-ts in a rather limited scope. You could proceed to create other such functional "bubbles" inside your app. This just means that your overall architecture will remain imperative.

Having only one Task or IO means you have managed to defined your application architecture in a functional manner. Your functional React app would then contain imperative bubbles. However, the imperative bubbles would never be executed in the functional context. Instead your code would simply combine the imperative bubbles and return them towards the application root.

The benefit of going 100% functional is that reasoning about the code becomes easier since the imperative bubbles that create unexpected consequences are executed "outside" your application. However, this also means less control over what the computer is doing since you are describing ideas rather than actions.

Ultimately you need to decide what parts of your app are functional or imperative. Functional parts will have more clarity while the imperative parts give you more precise control over execution.

I think it's profound that the very nature of IO is to create an 'imperative bubble'. We can extend this to say that any implementation in any language, from haskell to C, exists along a kind of 'purity' spectrum, and that proper or improper usage of 'IO' is only one facet of this. Total purity is not an end in and of itself; it's not even possible, let alone realistic.

True to its name, fp-ts does its best to provide a pure functional programming experience. Unlike fantasy land's Fluture which is designed for today's more imperative environment, fp-ts actually does inhabit a kind of 'typed-language fantasy land' where IO is universally referentially transparent. This is why, originally, fp-ts stood for 'fantasy problem - terribly strict' [citation needed].

However, with the right tooling, we can work towards a fantastical Future (quite a Task). With time we might see a shift in paradigm among web developers all over. fp-ts can take us to new heights, show us broader horizons, and in time maybe people will take the leap. Someday we can live in a world of purescript integration