[Déjà Fu is] A martial art in which the user's limbs move in time as well as space, […] It is best described as "the feeling that you have been kicked in the head this way before" -- Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
Concurrency is nice, deadlocks and race conditions not so much. The
Par
monad family, as defined in
abstract-par
provides deterministic parallelism, but sometimes we can tolerate a
bit of nondeterminism.
This package builds on the
concurrency
package by enabling you to systematically and deterministically test
your concurrent programs.
Déjà Fu with IO
:
The core assumption underlying Déjà Fu is that any apparent
nondeterminism arises purely from the scheduling behaviour. To put
it another way, a given computation, parametrised with a fixed set
of scheduling decisions, is deterministic.
Whilst this assumption may not hold in general when IO
is
involved, you should strive to produce test cases where it does.
Memory Model
The testing functionality supports a few different memory models,
for computations which use non-synchronised CRef
operations. The
supported models are:
Sequential Consistency: A program behaves as a simple
interleaving of the actions in different threads. When a CRef is
written to, that write is immediately visible to all threads.
Total Store Order (TSO): Each thread has a write buffer. A
thread sees its writes immediately, but other threads will only
see writes when they are committed, which may happen later. Writes
are committed in the same order that they are created.
Partial Store Order (PSO): Each CRef has a write buffer. A
thread sees its writes immediately, but other threads will only
see writes when they are committed, which may happen later. Writes
to different CRefs are not necessarily committed in the same order
that they are created.
If a testing function does not take the memory model as a parameter,
it uses TSO.
See the README for more
details.