Aff

If you're writing an application (as opposed to a library), you should almost always use Aff to run your native side-effectful computations rather than Effect. Here are some of its advantages:

• prevents "callback hell" for which Node.js is well-known.
• enables concurrent programming (but not parallel programming as JavaScript is single-threaded).
• is a stack-safe monad (Effect is not currently stack-safe).

Aff is basically what one would get if one implemented JavaScript Promises as a Monad.

Before continuing one with this folder's contents, watch Async Programming in PureScript to learn what problem Aff solves and a tour of its API for how to use it (actual video on YouTube is titled: "LA PureScript Meetup 12/05/17").

If, after watching the above video, you are tempted to figure out how Aff works internally, let me strongly recommend against that. The JavaScript code used to implement Aff is difficult to understand. Your time would be better invested elsewhere. Rather, I'd recommend looking at it when you have a better grasp of FP concepts.

Folder's Contents

First, we'll overview some of Affs API via some working examples that one can play with. Since all programs must be run in Effect, this will show the simplest way to start running computations in the Aff monad: launchAff_

Second, we'll show one way for making it possible to run an Effect-based computations in an Aff monadic context. (Note: this solution won't work for the ST monadic context in the Effect folder's Local-State.purs example.) Then, we'll show how to fix the issue we experienced in our the Effect folder's Timeout-and-Interval.purs file.

Third, we'll use the Node.ReadLine library to show how to convert Effect-based computations that require callbacks into Aff-based computations via makeAff. We'll also show the more complicated way to run a computation in the Aff monad, but which exposes all of Aff's features: runAff.

Finally, we'll link to other Aff-based libraries that one will likely find helpful.