Applications and libraries/Generic programming

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Common library for generic programming

Johan Jeuring and Andres Loeh announced an initiative to design a common library for generic programming, which should work together with most of the Haskell compilers, and for which they hope to guarantee support for generics in Haskell into the future. If you want to get involved (or just want to see the discussion), you can subscribe to the generics mailing list. Check the Haskell research wiki for some background on generics.

Work Plan

We have identified a number of approaches that are potential candidates to a generic programming library:

• A Lightweight Implementation Generics and Dynamics

• SYB (and variants)

• Strafunski

• Generics for the Masses

• Generics as a library

• Smash your Boilerplate

• RepLib

• Extensible superclasses

• Almost compositional functions

At the moment we are discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches. Each approach is roughly two weeks under discussion and the results will be published in this Wiki Page. There is also a darcs repository where you can find some code that we are collecting. For retriving this code do:

> darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/generics

The template that we are using to summarise the different approaches can be found here.

Alternatives

• Uniplate, recently released by Neil Mitchell.

Benchmark suite

We have developed a benchmark suite that tests the expressiveness of different generic programming libraries. To download the code do:

> darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/generics

And run the tests as follows:

> cd generics/comparison

> runghc test.hs --all

Have a look at the README file in that directory for information about the benchmark suite and needed dependencies.