How can I manage an exclusive state in F#? - f#

Question

I am not sure about "exclusive state management" thing in the title, I did my best making it up trying to put the problem concisely.
I am porting some of my C# code to F# trying to do it as idiomatic as I can. I have an entity that requests a number of ID's from a sequence in my database and then dispenses these ID to anyone in need. Once an id is given out it should no longer be available for anybody else. Hence there must be some sort of state associated with that entity that keeps track of the remaining number of IDs. Since using a mutable state is not idiomatic, what I can do is to write something like this:
let createIdManager =
let idToStartWith = 127
let allowed = 10
let givenOut = 0
(idToStartWith, allowed, givenOut)
-
let getNextAvailableId (idToStartWith, allowed, givenOut) =
if givenOut< allowed
then ((idToStartWith, allowed, givenOut+ 1), Some(idToStartWith + givenOut))
else ((idToStartWith, allowed, givenOut), None)
let (idManager, idOpt) = getNextAvailableId createIdManager()
match idOpt with
| Some(id) -> printf "Yay!"
| None -> reloadIdManager idManager |> getNextAvailableId
This approach is idiomatic (as far as I can tell) but extremely vulnerable. There are so many ways to get it messed up. My biggest concern is that once an id is advanced and a newer copy of id manager is made, there is no force that can stop you from using the older copy and get the same id again.
So how do I do exclusive state management, per se, in F#?

Answer 1

If you only need to initialize the set of ids once then you can simply hide a mutable reference to a list inside a local function scope, as in:
let nextId =
let idsRef = ref <| loadIdsFromDatabase()
fun () ->
match idsRef.Value with
| [] ->
None
| id::ids ->
idsRef := ids
Some id
let id1 = nextId ()
let id2 = nextId ()

Answer 2

You could use a state-monad(Computational Expression).
First we declare the state-monad
type State<'s,'a> = State of ('s -> 'a * 's)
type StateBuilder<'s>() =
member x.Return v : State<'s,_> = State(fun s -> v,s)
member x.Bind(State v, f) : State<'s,_> =
State(fun s ->
let (a,s) = v s
let (State v') = f a
v' s)
let withState<'s> = StateBuilder<'s>()
let runState (State f) init = f init
Then we define your 'IdManager' and a function to get the next available id as well as the new state after the execution of the function.
type IdManager = {
IdToStartWith : int
Allowed : int
GivenOut : int
}
let getNextId state =
if state.Allowed > state.GivenOut then
Some (state.IdToStartWith + state.GivenOut), { state with GivenOut = state.GivenOut + 1 }
else
None, state
Finally we define our logic that requests the ids and execute the state-monad.
let idStateProcess =
withState {
let! id1 = State(getNextId)
printfn "Got id %A" id1
let! id2 = State(getNextId)
printfn "Got id %A" id2
//...
return ()
}
let initState = { IdToStartWith = 127; Allowed = 10; GivenOut = 0 }
let (_, postState) =
runState
idStateProcess
initState //This should be loaded from database in your case
Output:
Got id Some 127
Got id Some 128