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This new repo contains all the transient libraries

A new release of transient with a lot of improvements to strenghten the execution model is coming.

What is Transient?

One of the dreams of software engineering is unrestricted composability.

This may be put in these terms:

let ap1 and ap2 two applications with arbitrary complexity, with all effects including multiple threads, asynchronous IO, indeterminism, events and perhaps, distributed computing.

Then the combinations:

 - ap1 <|> ap2          -- Alternative expression
 - ap1 >>= \x -> ap2    -- monadic sequence
 - ap1 <> ap2           -- monoidal expression
 - (,) <$> ap1 <*> ap2  -- Applicative expression

are possible if the types match, and generate new applications that are composable as well.

Transient does exactly that.

The operators <$> <*> and <> express concurrency, the operator <|> express parallelism and >>= for sequencing of threads, distributed processes or web widgets. So even in the presence of these effects and others, everything is composable.

For this purpose transient is an extensible effects monad with all major effects and primitives for parallelism, events, asynchronous IO, early termination, non-determinism logging and distributed computing. Since it is possible to extend it with more effects without adding monad transformers, the composability is assured.

Motivating example

This program, will stream "hello world" from all the nodes connected if you enter "fire" in the console

main= keep $ initNode $ inputNodes <|> distribStream

distribStream= do
      local $ option "fire" "fire"
      r <- clustered . local . choose $ repeat "hello world"
      localIO $ print r

Read the tutorial to know how to compile and invoke it.

This program will present a link in the browser and stream fibonnacci numbers to the browser when yo click it. (if you have Docker, you can run it straigh from the console; See this

main= keep . initNode $ webFib

webFib= onBrowser $ do
    local . render $  wlink () (h1 "hello fibonacci numbers")

    r <-  atRemote $ do
                r <- local . threads 1 . choose $ take 10 fibs
                localIO $ print r
                localIO $ threadDelay 1000000
                return r

    local . render . rawHtml $ (h2 r)
    where
    fibs = 0 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs) :: [Int]

This program combines both functionalities:

main= keep . initNode $ inputNodes <|> webFib <|> distribStream

Documentation

The Wiki is more user oriented

My video sessions in livecoding.tv not intended as tutorials or presentations, but show some of the latest features running.

The articles are more technical:

These articles contain executable examples (not now, since the site no longer support the execution of haskell snippets).

Plans

Once composability in the large is possible, there are a infinite quantity of ideas that may be realized. There are short term and long term goals. An status of development is regularly published in Gitter.

Among the most crazy ones is the possibility of extending this framework to other languages and make them interoperable. treating whole packaged applications as components, and docking them as lego pieces in a new layer of the Operating system where the shell allows such kind of type safe docking. this composable docker allows all kinds of composability, while the current docker platform is just a form of degraded monoid that do not compute.

Once you learn something interesting, you can contribute to the wiki

You can also donate