haskell / haskell/HTTP

Custom instances of HStream impossible to write

Open
#86 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Dominant language
Haskell
Stars
186
Forks
59
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

It would be nice to be able to have an instance of [`HStream`](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/HTTP-4000.2.19/docs/Network-TCP.html#t:HStream) that allows to stream without using lazy I/O; in particular, an instance that would allow us to close the connection when we no longer want the rest of the response body.

However, in order to define a custom type with a corresponding `HStream` instance one needs to provide, amongst other things, implementations of

``` haskell
openStream :: String -> Int -> IO (HandleStream bufType)
close :: HandleStream bufType -> IO ()
```

For the implementation of `openStream` we can use

``` haskell
openTCPConnection :: BufferType ty => String -> Int -> IO (HandleStream ty)
```

However, for the implementation of `close` we are stuck; there is no function analogous to `openTCPConnection` that allows us to close a `HandleStream`.

Although we have

``` haskell
hstreamToConnection :: HandleStream String -> Connection
```

and there is a [`Stream`](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/HTTP-4000.2.19/docs/Network-Stream.html#t:Stream) instance for [`Connection`](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/HTTP-4000.2.19/docs/Network-TCP.html#t:Connection), `hstreamToConnection` works _only_ for `HandleStream String`, so that doesn't help either.

Finally, the [`HandleStream`](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/HTTP-4000.2.19/docs/Network-TCP.html#t:HandleStream) type is completely opaque (it does not even satisfy `Functor`) so we cannot define a `HStream` instance for one `bufType` in terms of the `HStream` instance for another. If we had _some_ way of defining new instances in terms of old instances (for instance, reuse the instance for lazy bytestrings, but somehow retain a handle to the corresponding `HandleStream` so that we can close it explicitly) that would be great.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.