ZRef

A ZRef[EA, EB, A, B] is a polymorphic, purely functional description of a mutable reference. The fundamental operations of a ZRef are set and get.

• set takes a value of type A and sets the reference to a new value, potentially failing with an error of type EA.
• get gets the current value of the reference and returns a value of type B, potentially failing with an error of type EB.

When the error and value types of the ZRef are unified, that is, it is a ZRef[E, E, A, A], the ZRef also supports atomic modify and update operations. All operations are guaranteed to be safe for concurrent access.

Note:

While ZRef provides the functional equivalent of a mutable reference, the value inside the ZRef should be immutable. For performance reasons ZRef is implemented in terms of compare and swap operations rather than synchronization. These operations are not safe for mutable values that do not support concurrent access.