A more useful Monoid instance for Data.Map

Christian Sattler sattler.christian at gmail.com
Sun Jan 6 08:08:14 CET 2013


Irrespective of the eventual replacement, I propose that we remove the 
current Monoid instance right now. This would also give proprietary 
codebases more time to adapt to the semantic change.

Christian

On 2013-01-05 21:00, Roman Cheplyaka wrote:
> Great job!
>
> To be fair, there might be code which is not released on hackage (e.g.
> proprietary), but the current instance is so bad that we really should
> take a chance to fix it.
>
> But there's another problem... The "right" instance should really be
> based on Semigroup, not Monoid, but Semigroup is not currently in the
> base. And adding a dependency on semigroups to containers is hardly an
> option.
>
> So maybe we should push the change that was discussed in another thread
> to move Semigroup into base, and only then change this instance.
>
> Roman
>
> * Christian Sattler <sattler.christian at gmail.com> [2013-01-05 20:07:02+0100]
>> Hi all,
>>
>> After repeated frustration over the wrong Monoid (Data.Map.Map k v)
>> instance I finally went ahead and did a practical test concerning its
>> current usage.
>>
>> After removing the Monoid instance for Map and IntMap, each reverse
>> dependency of containers was separately compiled under a standard setup of
>> GHC 7.6.1 in order to avoid shared dependency problems. Out of 1440 reverse
>> dependencies, I could get 545 to compile. However, only the following
>> packages fail because of Monoid instance issues:
>>
>> - caledon
>> - data-default
>> - dom-lt
>> - EnumMap
>> - i18n
>> - semigroups
>> - unamb-custom
>> - vacuum
>> - stringtable-atom
>>
>> EnumMap has containers <0.3, semigroups declares <0.6, unamb-custom appears
>> to be a private abandoned clone with uploads only on 24/12/08,
>> stringtable-atom fails to build because of a previous API change for
>> updateMax, and the rest only use the instance internally for saying mempty
>> instead of Data.Map.empty.
>>
>> Under these circumstances, fixing the Monoid instance mistake for
>> containers 0.6.0.0 does not seem to introduce any semantic breakage at all.
>> I have CCed the maintainers of the lastly mentioned packages.
>>
>> Let's do it!
>> Christian
>>
>>
>> 2012/4/28 Daniel Peebles <pumpkingod at gmail.com>
>>
>>> I don't actually think there are any rules/optimizations for fmap of
>>> newtype constructors or extractors in general. Luckily, unsafeCoerce is
>>> explicitly specified to be safe, in this kind of situation (assuming the
>>> Map is actually parametric in its value type, which it is)! ;)
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 12:31 PM, Evan Laforge <qdunkan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 7:00 PM, Daniel Peebles <pumpkingod at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> Why not be explicit about the replacement strategy by injecting your
>>>> values
>>>>> into First/Last? My point is that in terms of functionality, using
>>>> mappend
>>>>> on the values is strictly more general than the current instance. It
>>>> seems
>>>>> unfortunate to be stuck with the current instance for historical
>>>> reasons,
>>>>> but I guess that's how a lot of this stuff works :/
>>>> Yeah, I suppose it would be a bit more regular that way.  I'm always
>>>> reluctant to map newtypes over things other than lists because I don't
>>>> trust there to be a RULES that will eliminate it, but I suppose for
>>>> Map there must be.  I guess I wouldn't mind updating my code if the
>>>> definition changed.  It's hard to change a general purpose method
>>>> though, simply because searching for it in your code will turn up so
>>>> many false positives.
>>>>
>>>
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