Showing posts with label type classes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label type classes. Show all posts

Friday, December 23, 2011

Hacking Type Classes in F#

Recent FPish FPish discussion focused on some hacks available in F# to write code that resembles using Haskell type classes. I particularly enjoyed the comments by Gustavo Leon and Loic Denuziere.

To cut the long story short, before compiling to .NET F# expands methods delcared inline and does overload resolution. This was intended to support flexible operator overloading, but opens up the door for interesting hacks. Even code that generalizes over higher kinds and therefore cannot exist at .NET level can with these hacks exist at the inline F# level.

Although these remain hacks (ugly code, unreadable inferred types, fragility to changes when type inference stops working, difficulty in scaling to more complicated examples), I cannot help but enjoy it. Here is a writeup that infers JSON serialization automatically over lists at the inline level: