[Haskell-cafe] A yet another question about subtyping and heterogeneous collections

[oleg at okmij.org]

> And HList paper left me with two questions. The first one is how much
> such an encoding costs both in terms of speed and space. And the
> second one is can I conveniently define a Storable instance for
> hlists. As I said before, I need all this machinery to parse a great
> number of serialized nested C structs from a file.

I'm afraid I've overlooked the part about the great serialized C
structs. Serializing HList is easy -- it's de-serialization that is
difficult. Essentially, we need to write a
mini-type-checker. Sometimes, Template Haskell can help, and we can
use GHC's own type-checker.

Since the approach you outlined relies on Haskell type-classes to
express hierarchies, you'll have the same type-checking
problem. You'll have to somehow deduce those type-class constraints
during the de-serialization, and convince GHC of them. If you assume
a fixed number of classes (C struct types), things become simpler. The
HList-based solution becomes just as simple if you assume a fixed
number of record types.