[Haskell] Common library for generic programming

[Johan Jeuring]

Dear haskellers,

Generic programming has been around for more than 10 years now. We  
think a lot of progress has been made in the last decade. As an  
example, there are more than 10 proposals for libraries or language  
extensions only for Haskell.

The success  of generic programming has also caused a problem:  
although generic programming has been applied in several  
applications, it lacks actual users for real-life projects (HaRe  
using Strafunski is maybe an exception). This is understandable:  
choosing a particular approach to generic programming for a real-life  
project is rather risky: few approaches that have been developed over  
the last decade are still supported, and there is a high risk that  
the chosen approach will not be supported anymore, or that at least  
it will change in a backwards incompatible way in a couple of years  
time.

We have recently started an initiative to design a common library for  
generic programming, which should work together with most of the  
Haskell compilers, and for which we hope to guarantee support for a  
longer period.

If you want to get involved (or just want to see the discussion), you  
can subscribe to the mailing list generics at haskell.org, see

http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/generics

-- Johan Jeuring and Andres Loeh