Comparing Libraries For Generic Programming In Haskell
Paper in proceeding, 2008

Datatype-generic programming is defining functions that depend on the structure, or ``shape'', of datatypes. It has been around for more than 10 years, and a lot of progress has been made, in particular in the lazy functional programming language Haskell. There are more than 10 proposals for generic programming libraries or language extensions for Haskell. To compare and characterize the many generic programming libraries in a typed functional language, we introduce a set of criteria and develop a generic programming benchmark: a set of characteristic examples testing various facets of datatype-generic programming. We have implemented the benchmark for nine existing Haskell generic programming libraries and present the evaluation of the libraries. The comparison is useful for reaching a common standard for generic programming, but also for a programmer who has to choose a particular approach for datatype-generic programming.

Polytypic Programming

Functional Programming

Author

Alexey Rodriguez

Utrecht University

Johan Jeuring

Open University of the Netherlands

Patrik Jansson

University of Gothenburg

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering and Technology (Chalmers)

Alex Gerdes

University of Gothenburg

Oleg Kiselyov

Chalmers

Bruno C D S Oliveira

University of Oxford

ACM Sigplan Notices:1st ACM SIGPLAN Haskell Symposium, Haskell'08; Victoria, BC; Canada; 25 September 2008 through 25 September 2008

Vol. 44 2 111-122
978-160558064-7 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Software Engineering

DOI

10.1145/1411286.1411301

ISBN

978-160558064-7

More information

Latest update

7/19/2023