vector and GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving

[John Lato]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for pointing me to the ticket; I agree that's the issue (although
I'm glad to have you and Simon confirm it).  I've summarized the issue and
raised the priority, and Simon linked to this thread.

I would have expected this would have affected a lot users, but as I
haven't heard many complaints (and nobody else said anything here!) maybe
the impact is smaller than I thought.

Thanks,
John


On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 6:02 AM, Richard Eisenberg <eir at cis.upenn.edu>wrote:

> Is this an instance of https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8177 ? I
> think so.
>
> The problem boils down to the fact that Vector and MVector are data
> families and are thus (currently) exempted from the roles mechanism. (Or,
> more properly, may *only* have nominal roles.) There is no technical reason
> for this restriction. It's just that the feature would take a few solid
> days of work to implement and I wasn't aware of a concrete use case.
>
> Here is such a use case.
>
> If you agree that you've hit #8177, please post to that bug report and
> raise the priority to High -- being able to coerce Vectors seems very
> reasonable indeed, and we should support it. I doubt the feature will land
> in 7.8.3 (depending on the timeline for that release), but I'll get to it
> eventually. (Or, if you feel this is more critical in the larger picture,
> shout more loudly on the ticket and perhaps I can squeeze it in before
> 7.8.3.)
>
> Thanks,
> Richard
>
> On May 13, 2014, at 9:39 PM, John Lato <jwlato at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> Prior to ghc-7.8, it was possible to do this:
>
> > module M where
> >
> > import qualified Data.Vector.Generic.Base as G
> > import qualified Data.Vector.Generic.Mutable as M
> > import Data.Vector.Unboxed.Base -- provides MVector and Vector
> >
> > newtype Foo = Foo Int deriving (Eq, Show, Num,
> >     M.MVector MVector, G.Vector Vector, Unbox)
>
> M.MVector is defined as
>
> > class MVector v a where
> >     basicLength :: v s a -> Int
> etc.
>
> With ghc-7.8 this no longer compiles due to an unsafe coercion, as MVector
> s Foo and MVector s Int have different types.  The error suggests trying
> -XStandaloneDeriving to manually specify the context, however I don't see
> any way that will help in this case.
>
> For that matter, I don't see any way to fix this in the vector package
> either.  We might think to define
>
> > type role M.MVector nominal representational
>
> but that doesn't work as both parameters to M.MVector require a nominal
> role (and it's probably not what we really want anyway).  Furthermore
> Data.Vector.Unboxed.Base.MVector (which fills in at `v` in the instance) is
> a data family, so we're stuck at that point also.
>
> So given this situation, is there any way to automatically derive Vector
> instances from newtypes?
>
> tl;dr: I would really like to be able to do:
>
> > coerce (someVector :: Vector Foo) :: Vector Int
>
> am I correct that the current machinery isn't up to handling this?
>
> Thanks,
> John
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