Skip to main content

One post tagged with "haskell"

View All Tags

ยท 16 min read

IOSim on Hackageโ€‹

The IOG Networking Team is pleased to announce that we published [io-sim], [io-classes], [si-timers], [strict-stm], [strict-mvar] and [io-classes-mtl] on Hackage. These are tools without which we could not imagine writing a complex distributed system like [Cardano].

These packages support our goal of using the same code to run in production and simulation, what greatly increases the reliability and quality of the final system. [io-sim] and its ecosystem is designed to let write a simulation environment which provides provided things usually provided by an operating system like networking stack or disk IO and develop as well as implement & model complex applications/systems.

For developing a robust system one needs a proper testing framework which allows one to model the key characteristics of the system. To achieve this goal we needed to create an abstraction that captures the key aspects of the Haskell runtime and operating system environment for distributed systems. The Cardano [network stack][ouroboros-network] is a highly concurrent system, and as a network application, it needs to deal with time: there are all sorts of timeouts that guard resource usage: inactivity timeouts, message timeouts, or an application level TCP's WAIT_TIMEOUT among others. The tools which we provide permitted us to capture issues related to timing (which abound in network programming) which, in production, would be extremely rare (things like simultaneous TCP open or critical race conditions) and ensure that we can test (in the simulation) these scenarios. Recently we caught a [bug][sim-tcp-open-bug] in simultaneous TCP open when one side of the connection crashed - a corner case of a corner case, that's how effective is the combination of quickcheck style property-based testing & simulation!