Using coroutines for monadic composition

This repository shows how coroutines can be used to compose operations that return types that either contain a result to be used in further computation or sn indication of error.

The goal is to make such composition as easy as Haskell's do notation.

Requirements

The implemetation requires an implementation of the Coroutines TS (https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4663.pdf). As of June 10, 2017, the only such implementation is a trunk build of clang with trunk libc++.

In particular, the MSVC implementation convert the object returned by get_return_object to the return type of the coroutine immediately rather than waiting until the coroutine returns to its caller.

Example

See test_expected.cpp for three different ways to compose a sequence of calls to functions returning expected values.

The expected in question is a very simple example defined in expected.h; this is not intended to be anywhere near fully-featured (and is probably not even correct). This definition knows nothing about coroutines; all of the coroutine machinery is in either.h.

Here's what one can write in Haskell:

data MyError = MyError Int

f1 :: Either MyError Int
f1 = Right 7

f2 :: Int -> Either MyError Float
f2 x = Right (fromIntegral x * 2.0)

f3 :: Int -> Float -> Either MyError Int
f3 x y = Left (MyError 42)

test :: Either MyError Int
test =
  do x <- f1
     y <- f2 x
     z <- f3 x y
     return z

With the code in the repository, you can write it like this in C++:

struct error {
  int code;
};

expected<int, error> f1() noexcept { return 7; }
expected<double, error> f2(int x) noexcept { return 2.0 * x; }
expected<int, error> f3(int x, double y) noexcept { return error{42}; }

auto test_expected_coroutine() {
  return []() -> expected<int, error> {
    auto x = co_await f1();
    auto y = co_await f2(x);
    auto z = co_await f3(x, y);
    co_return z;
  }();
}