pinch-gen: A code generator for the pinch Thrift library.

pinch aims to provide an alternative implementation of Apache Thrift for Haskell. The pinch library itself acts only as a serialization library. Types specify their Thrift encoding by defining instances of the Pinchable typeclass, which may be done by hand or automatically with the use of Generics.

Haddock documentation for this package is avilable on Hackage.

Overview

Converts a Thrift file into Haskell code for the pinch library.

Usage:

Usage: pinch-gen --in IN_FILE --out OUT_DIR --hashable-vec-mod ARG
                 [--no-generate-arbitrary] [--no-generate-nfdata] [--extra-import IMPORT]
  Generate Haskell files from a thrift input file.

The --hashable-vec-mod argument should be set to a module providing a Hashable instance for Vector. This is required as a Vector may become part of a key of a map, but neither the vector nor the hashable package provide an instance. For some background, see https://github.com/haskell/vector/pull/102 .The simplest solution is to depend on the vector-instances package and pass --hashable-vec-mod Data.Vector.Instances to pinch-gen.

Compatibility

Example

Let us use this simple Thrift service as an example:

trivial.thrift

# A simple struct
struct MyStruct {
  1: required binary payload;
}

# Trivial exception for testing only.
exception Exception {

  # The exception simply contains a message string.
  1: required string message;
}

# Trivial service for testing only.
service Trivial {

  # Takes a struct and returns a string.
  string success(1: MyStruct argument);

  # Throws an arbitrary string.
  void failure() throws (1: Exception error);

  # Fire rocket.
  oneway void fireAndForget(1: i32 rocket);
}

To generate the corresponding Haskell code we can call pinch-gen:

pinch-gen --no-generate-arbitrary --no-generate-nfdata --hashable-vec-mod Data.Vector.Instances --in trivial.thrift --out out/

This will create the appropriate datatypes for all struct, union and exception types:

out/Trivial/Types.hs

data MyStruct
  = MyStruct
  { myStruct_payload :: Data.ByteString.ByteString
  }
  deriving (Prelude.Eq, GHC.Generics.Generic, Prelude.Show)

data Exception
  = Exception
  { exception_message :: Data.Text.Text
  }
  deriving (Prelude.Eq, GHC.Generics.Generic, Prelude.Show)

For the server, a record-style encoding of all functions is used. Given an implementation of these functions, a Pinch.Server.ThriftServer for use with the pinch library can be created:

out/Trivial/Server.hs

data Trivial
  = Trivial
  { success :: (Pinch.Server.Context) -> (MyStruct) -> (Prelude.IO Data.Text.Text)
  , failure :: (Pinch.Server.Context) -> (Prelude.IO ())
  , fireAndForget :: (Pinch.Server.Context) -> (Data.Int.Int32) -> (Prelude.IO ())
  }

trivial_mkServer :: (Trivial) -> Pinch.Server.ThriftServer
trivial_mkServer server = ...

For the client, functions creating a Pinch.Client.ThriftCall for use with the pinch library are generated. You can use Pinch.Client.call if you want to explicitly match on the success result/thrown exceptions as defined in the Thrift file. Alternatively, you may use Pinch.Client.callOrThrow to directly access the result. In case the rqeuest failed, callOrThrow will throw an exception using throwIO.

out/Trivial/Client.hs

success :: (MyStruct) -> (Pinch.Client.ThriftCall Success_Result)
success argument = ...

failure :: (Pinch.Client.ThriftCall Failure_Result)
failure  = ...

fireAndForget :: (Data.Int.Int32) -> (Pinch.Client.ThriftCall Pinch.Internal.RPC.Unit)
fireAndForget rocket = ...

Caveats

The generated code is currently not formatted very nicely.