We've covered the essential upgrades to Pinto and Stetson, so now we'll cover a quick bonus topic which is one of the concepts thrown into Pinto to help with all of this work.
A lot of legacy Erlang code (ours included) will have something along the lines of
cool_api:do_something().
That behind the scenes will almost immediately do a call to self() to get the caller pid and then probably spin up some more processes and start sending messages back to us.
do_something() ->
Self = self(),
spawn_link(fun Fun() ->
receive
_ -> ok
after 1000 ->
Self ! hi
Fun()
end
end).
In this case, we've got a native function called do_something() that captures the current pid, spins up a process which will stop if it receives anything and otherwise every second send a message back to the parent (hi).
If we were to write FFI for this, it'd look a lot like this:
foreign import doSomething :: Effect Pid
foreign import stop :: Effect Unit
doSomething() ->
fun() ->
cool_api:do_something()
end.
stop(Pid) ->
fun() ->
Pid ! this_will_stop_you_cos_you_received_something
end.
We would immediately start receiving atoms of 'hi' to the calling process, which unless we happen to be very specific and careful, won't know how to receive them, for example in a gen server.
type State = {}
serverName :: ServerName State Atom
serverName = Local $ atom "listener"
startLink :: Effect StartLinkResult
startLink =
Gen.buildStartLink serverName init $ Gen.defaultStartLink { handleInfo = handleInfo }
init :: Gen.Init State Atom
init args = do
Gen.lift CoolApi.doSomething
pure $ {}
handleInfo :: Atom -> State -> Gen.HandleInfo State Atom
handleInfo msg state = do
-- got an atom, woo
-- not much to do with it
pure CastNoReply state
This will work, it's a gen server that knows how to receive atoms - but it's unlikely we'll want to write a gen server that only receives atoms and nothing else - as soon as we add a timer, monitor or subscribe to anything else we'll want to change our message type into an ADT so that we can dispatch over the various message types.
type Msg = CoolApiMsg Atom
| Tick
So we're going to need some way to map this.
The old way: We'd register a mapping function with the gen server that would recognise the cool_api messages and convert them into the right type for us, this was janky AF and has been deleted in the latest Pinto
the new way: Proxy process that receives the message, translates it and then sends it on to the main process
That proxy process is a burden to create because if we start spawning processes in Erlang, we need to make sure we monitor the parent so we terminate when it does, yada yada yada what a mess. Thankfully this is what MessageRouter in Pinto is for, it neatly wraps up this common pattern safely so we don't have to.
The message router exports three functions of interest, one of which invokes a router on top of a process that will always start, and one on top of a process that might fail, the third takes a RouterRef (returned on success) and terminates the router.
startRouter :: forall handle msg. Effect handle -> (handle -> Effect Unit) -> (msg -> Effect Unit) -> Effect (RouterRef handle)
maybeStartRouter = maybeStartRouterImpl RouterRef
stopRouter :: forall handle. RouterRef handle -> Effect Unit
We'll focus on the simple case.
Wrapping our legacy API is "simple" now that we've already written the FFI for it
import Pinto.MessageRouting as MR
wrappedDoSomething :: forall. (Atom -> Effect Unit) -> Effect (MR.RouterRef Pid)
wrappedDoSomething recv = MR.startRouter CoolApi.doSomething CoolApi.stop recv
With this, we can re-write our gen server with the message lifted into the appropriate type
type State = {}
data Msg = Tick | DoSomething Atom
serverName :: ServerName State Msg
serverName = Local $ atom "listener"
startLink :: Effect StartLinkResult
startLink =
Gen.buildStartLink serverName init $ Gen.defaultStartLink { handleInfo = handleInfo }
init :: Gen.Init State Msg
init args = do
self <- Gen.self
Gen.lift Wrapper.wrappedDoSomething $ send self <<< DoSomething
pure $ {}
handleInfo :: Msg -> State -> Gen.HandleInfo State Atom
handleInfo msg state = do
case msg of
Tick -> ...
DoSomething msg -> ...
It means an extra process per router, so isn't something we want to be using if we're going to be spinning up 1000s of short lived versions of it, but for that sort of thing we're in specialist territory where we'd be using a look up table or dropping to plain ol' Erlang. (See also Pinto.Timer which just uses the underlying mechanisms to send messages of the right type directly without an intermediary process.
The point is that wrapping up legacy code that sends us arbitrary messages has been turned into a relatively small amount of work as a result of these changes, so long as we supply a start function and a stop function and a callback that knows what to do with the messages we can transform and then send accordingly. This has been used across our codebases with great success (as well as in Pinto itself) and has enabled our gen servers and web handlers to remain clean and receive the right typed messages.
2020 © Rob Ashton. ALL Rights Reserved.