[Hs-Generics] Re: Owning SYB

Fri Aug 1 10:08:38 EDT 2008

oops, keybinding malfunction - that message went out unfinished.
Seems to have most parts, though, so I leave it at that.

One other thing I meant to ask was about procedure,
given that Syb is currently in base and hence under the
library modification process. How is this going to combine
with an active maintainer and some parts on hackage?

Claus

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Claus Reinke" <claus.reinke at talk21.com>
To: "José Pedro Magalhães" <jpm at cs.uu.nl>; <generics at haskell.org>; <libraries at haskell.org>
Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 3:02 PM
Subject: Re: [Hs-Generics] Re: Owning SYB

> Hi Pedro,
>
> and thanks for volunteering! I include a summary of where I'm at, for
> your information (and that of other interested readers;-)
>
>> Recently, (at least) Claus and Oleg have been posting interesting
>> suggestions of improvements/modifications to SYB. Those should be further
>> analyzed and discussed, and finally introduced (or not) in the library. The
>> generic map for SYB, for instance, evolved from the "impossible to
>> implement", through the "unsafe implementation", until the latest gmap2 as
>> described by Oleg [3]. If further tests show this function behaves as
>> expected, then it's clearly a good candidate for extending SYB. We should
>> also rethink if other things previously deemed impossible remain so.
>
> Further discussion welcome, of course!-) And it isn't just about getting
> fmap/traverse/.. from Data/Typeable, but also about reorganizing imports
> of Data instances, and providing alternatives of everywhere/everything
> that avoid traversals of irrelevant subterms.
>
> A current snapshot of my code can be found here:
>
> http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/~cr3/tmp/syb/syb-utils-0.0.2008.7.31.tar.gz
>
> It currently contains:
>
> a) a suggested split for the Instances module, with alternatives to Data.Generics that either 
> export only Standard instances, or no
>    instances at all.
>    On top of the existing Syb in base, these are somewhat tricky to use,
>    because of the implicit re-exports of Data.Generics.Instances from other libraries
>
>    http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/generics/2008-July/000371.html
>
>    and the long-standing GHC "session accumulates instances" bug
>
>    http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2182
>    http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/bugs.html#bugs-ghc
>
>    relevant modules:
>            Data.Generics.Alt,
>            Data.Generics.NoInstances,
>            Data.Generics.Instances.Standard,
>            Data.Generics.Instances.Dubious,
>            examples\Examples.hs
>    status: I think this change should go into base (perhaps renaming
>        Data.Generics.Alt to Data.Generics.Standard, and deprecating
>        Data.Generics and Data.Generics.Instances), for all the reasons
>        discussed here recently, and because that GHC bug makes it near
>        impossible to provide this change as an addon to base. Existing importers of Data.Generics 
> or Data.Generics.Instances in core
>        and extralibs should be redirected to one of the new modules.
>
> b) variants of everywhere/everything/mkQ/.. that retain the type domain
>    of generically extended queries, build substructure type maps of types
>    to be traversed, and use a slight generalisation of the Uniplate PlateData
>    trick to avoid traversals of irrelevant substructures (usually but not always
>    including, and not limited to, Strings)
>
>    relevant modules:
>            Data.Generics.GPS,
>            examples\GPSbenchmark.hs,
>            examples\CompanyDatatypes.hs
>
>    status:
>        This could be provided as an addon package. Performance
>        of generic queries and transformation on the usual Paradise
>        benchmark improve as expected; there is some overhead,
>        which is visible in an alternative benchmark where there are no irrelevant substructures.
>
>        The current code also tries to replace the linear search for
>        applicable specific-type-queries with Map lookup, but here
>        the overhead seems to outweigh the benefits, so I'll probably
>        disable this code in future.
>
>        One issue that I still need to address are nested types: just
>        as Data.Generics.PlateData, Data.Generics.GPS currently
>        fails for these (no finite representation of substructure types);
>        current plan is to recognize nested types and to fall back to
>        unoptimized traversals.
> c) generic default instance methods for Control.Monad.Functor
>    and Data.Traversable
>
>    relevant modules:
>            Data.Generics.Utils,
>            examples\Examples.hs
>
>    status:
>            under discusssion. could become part of that add-on package,
>            or move into base.
>
> d) some Data/Typeable instances and utilities for GHC Api
>
>    relevant modules:
>            GHC.Syb.Instances,
>            GHC.Syb.Instances0,
>            GHC.Syb.Utils
>
>    status:
>            needs more testing, will probably be rendered obsolete when
>            GHC Api starts providing those instances itself.
>
>> Maintaining SYB, alongside with the other generic libraries, will require
>> things such as:
>> * Releasing packages in Hackage, properly documented with Haddock;
>> * Updating such packages as necessary for new releases of GHC;
>> * Writing examples of how to use the libraries (from a user perspective);
>> * Writing testsuites, which are important for checking backwards
>> compatibility of any changes;
>> * Having an updated webpage linking to the library sources, documentation,
>> possibly a bug tracker, etc.
>> These are all things we plan to do for the libraries.
>>
>> Additionally, we could think of improving syb-with-class [4] in parallel
>> with regular SYB. This is something to ask to its maintainer.
>>
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Pedro
>>
>> [1]
>> http://books.google.com/books?id=OyY3ioMJRAsC&pg=PA199&sig=ACfU3U1nczeRAIjN9mc_vYnL1LnYAs70NA
>> [2] http://www.cs.uu.nl/research/techreps/UU-CS-2008-019.html
>> [3] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/generics/2008-July/000362.html
>> [4]
>> http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/syb-with-class
>>
>
>
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