Article

Practical generic programming in OCaml

Author:

Jeremy YallopAuthors Info & Claims

ML '07: Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Workshop on ML

Pages 83 - 94

https://doi.org/10.1145/1292535.1292548

Published: 02 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

We describe deriving, a system of extensible generic functions for OCaml implemented as a preprocessor and supporting library. We argue that generating code from type-definitions has significant advantages over a combinator approach, taking serialisation as an example application: our generate-your-boilerplate design results in a system that is easy to use, has comprehensive coverage of types and handles cyclic values without imposing a burden on the user. Users can extend generic functions with specialised implementations at particular types; we show how this can lead to dramatically improved performance in the serialisation task without the user writing a single line of serialisation code.

References

[1]

John Billings and Peter Sewell and Mark Shinwell and Rok Strniaš Type-safe distributed programming for OCaml MCM SIGPLAN Workshop on ML, 2006.

Digital Library

[2]

Jacques Carette, Lydia E. van Dijk and Oleg Kiselyov. Syntactic extension for Monads in Ocaml. http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~carette/pa_monad/.

[3]

James Cheney and Ralf Hinze. A lightweight implementation of generics and dynamics. Haskell Workshop, 2002.

Digital Library

[4]

Albert Cohen and C. Herrmann. Towards a High-Productivity and High-Performance Marshaling Library for Compound Data. 2nd MetaOCaml Workshop, 2005.

[5]

Ezra Cooper, Sam Lindley, Philip Wadler, and Jeremy Yallop. Links: Web Programming Without Tiers. FMCO, 2006.

Digital Library

[6]

Derek Dreyer, Robert Harper, Manuel Chakravarti, and Gabriele Keller. Modular Type Classes. POPL, 2007.

Digital Library

[7]

Martin Elsman. Type-Specialized Serialization with Sharing. Trends in Functional Programming, 2005.

[8]

Andrzej Filinski. Controlling Effects. PhD Thesis, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, May 1996.

[9]

Jacques Garrigue. Programming with Polymorphic Variants. ML Workshop, 1998.

[10]

Jeremy Gibbons. Design patterns as higher-order datatype-generic programs. Workshop on Generic Programming, 2006.

Digital Library

[11]

Ralf Hinze, Johan Jeuring, and Andres Löh. Comparing approaches to generic programming in Haskell. Spring School on Datatype-Generic Programming, 2006.

Digital Library

[12]

Ralf Hinze. Generics for the masses. ICFP, 2004.

Digital Library

[13]

Ralf Hinze, Andres Löh, and Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira. "Scrap Your Boilerplate" Reloaded FLOPS, 2006.

Digital Library

[14]

John Hughes. Why Functional Programming Matters. Computer Journal, 32(2), 1989.

Digital Library

[15]

Martin Jambon. json-static. http://martin.jambon.free.fr/json-static.html.

[16]

Martin Jambon. pa tryfinally. http://martin.jambon.free.fr/pa_tryfinally.ml.

[17]

Patrik Jansson and Johan Jeuring. PolyP -- a polytypic programming language extension. POPL, 1997.

Digital Library

[18]

Vesa Karvonen. Generics for the Working ML'er. ML Workshop, 2007.

Digital Library

[19]

R. Kelsey, W. Clinger, J. Rees (eds.). Revised5 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme. Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, 11(1), 1998.

Digital Library

[20]

Andrew J. Kennedy. Functional Pearl: Pickler Combinators. JFP, 14(6), 2004.

Digital Library

[21]

Oleg Kiselyov. Post to Haskell list, August 2004. http://haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2004-August/014463.html

[22]

Ralf Lämmel and Simon Peyton-Jones. Scrap your boilerplate: a practical design pattern for generic programming. TLDI, 2003.

Digital Library

[23]

Chuck Liang and Gopalan Nadathur. Tradeoffs in the Intensional Representation of Lambda Terms. RTA, 2002.

Digital Library

[24]

Neil Mitchell and Stefan O'Rear. Derive. http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~ndm/derive/.

[25]

Simon Peyton Jones and John Hughes (editors). Haskell 98: A Non-strict, Purely Functional Language. February, 1999.

[26]

Daniel de Rauglaudre. IoXML. http://cristal.inria.fr/~ddr/IoXML/.

[27]

Martin Sandin. Tywith. http://tools.assembla.com/tywith/wiki.

[28]

Guido Tack, Leif Kornstaedt and Gert Smolka. Generic Pickling and Minimization. ML Workshop, 2005.

[29]

Philip Wadler The essence of functional programming. POPL, 1992.

Digital Library

[30]

Stefan Wehr. ML Modules and Haskell Type Classes: A Constructive Comparison. Master's thesis, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany, November 2005.

[31]

Stephanie Weirich. RepLib: A library for derivable type classes. Haskell Workshop, 2006.

Digital Library

[32]

Noel Winstanley. DrIFT. http://repetae.net/~john/computer/haskell/DrIFT/.

[33]

Programming languages - C. ISO/IEC 9899:1999.

[34]

American National Standard for Programming Language Common LISP. ANSI X3.226:1994. J13/SC22/WG16 Common LISP

Cited By

Li RYallop J(2019)Extending OCaml's 'open'Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.294.1294(1-14)Online publication date: 16-May-2019
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.294.1
Balestrieri FMauny M(2018)Generic Programming in OCamlElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.285.3285(59-100)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2018
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.285.3
Kosarev DBoulytchev D(2018)Typed Embedding of a Relational Language in OCamlElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.285.1285(1-22)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2018
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.285.1
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Practical generic programming in OCaml
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Polymorphism

Recommendations

Usage of generic programming on hackage: experience report
WGP '13: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Generic programming

Generic programming language constructs, tools and libraries have been available in Haskell since the first report on the programming language Haskell. At the beginning of the 1990s generic programming techniques could be used via the deriving construct,...
Generic programming in Fortran
PEPM '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation

Parametric Fortran is an extension of Fortran that supports the construction of generic programs by allowing the parameterization of arbitrary Fortran constructs. A parameterized Fortran program can be translated into a regular Fortran program guided by ...
A comparative study of language support for generic programming
OOPSLA '03: Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programing, systems, languages, and applications

Many modern programming languages support basic generic programming, sufficient to implement type-safe polymorphic containers. Some languages have moved beyond this basic support to a broader, more powerful interpretation of generic programming, and ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ML '07: Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Workshop on ML

October 2007

102 pages

ISBN:9781595936769

DOI:10.1145/1292535

General Chair:
Claudio Russo
Microsoft Research Cambridge
,
Program Chair:
Derek Dreyer
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 October 2007

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

ICFP07

Sponsor:

ICFP07: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

October 5, 2007

Freiburg, Germany

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 6 of 11 submissions, 55%

Upcoming Conference

ICFP '25

Sponsor:
sigplan

ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

October 12 - 18, 2025

Singapore , Singapore

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

12
Total Citations
View Citations
624
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)10
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 04 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Li RYallop J(2019)Extending OCaml's 'open'Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.294.1294(1-14)Online publication date: 16-May-2019
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.294.1
Balestrieri FMauny M(2018)Generic Programming in OCamlElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.285.3285(59-100)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2018
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.285.3
Kosarev DBoulytchev D(2018)Typed Embedding of a Relational Language in OCamlElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.285.1285(1-22)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2018
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.285.1
Yallop J(2017)Staged generic programmingProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31102731:ICFP(1-29)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3110273
Henry GMauny MChailloux EManoury P(2012)Typing unmarshalling without marshalling typesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2398856.236456947:9(287-298)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2398856.2364569
Henry GMauny MChailloux EManoury PThiemann PFindler R(2012)Typing unmarshalling without marshalling typesProceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming10.1145/2364527.2364569(287-298)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2364527.2364569
Scott DSharp RGazagnaire TMadhavapeddy A(2010)Using functional programming within an industrial product groupACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1932681.186355745:9(87-92)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1932681.1863557
Scott DSharp RGazagnaire TMadhavapeddy AHudak PWeirich S(2010)Using functional programming within an industrial product groupProceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming10.1145/1863543.1863557(87-92)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1863543.1863557
Jeuring JLeather SPedro Magalhães JRodriguez Yakushev A(2009)Libraries for Generic Programming in HaskellAdvanced Functional Programming10.1007/978-3-642-04652-0_4(165-229)Online publication date: 2009
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04652-0_4
Jeuring JLeather SMagalhães JYakushev A(2008)Libraries for generic programming in haskellProceedings of the 6th international conference on Advanced functional programming10.5555/1813347.1813351(165-229)Online publication date: 19-May-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1813347.1813351
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten