Modular implicits

- Extremely dated: we have almost one new release every six month and in recent releases, the language runtime has been changed and user-defined effects have been introduced. - No HKTs "in your sense" but: ```ocaml module type S = sig type 'a t end `` `type 'a t` is an Higher…

nukifwAug 13, 2025View on HNParent context

> Ocaml messed up with their operators. ... I hope a future version adds module typeclasses Do you mean modular implicits?[1] The original paper was published in 2014. There's an internship report from 2023 that summarizes the design and implementation issues…

nequoJul 26, 2024View on HNParent context

Type classes are useful but can be overly restrictive as implemented in languages such as Haskell. In particular, Haskell prevents multiple implementations of a type class for a particular type (a property called canonicity). But there are lots of situations where there are many…

sgeisenhDec 13, 2021View on HNParent context

* GADTs: generalized algebraic data types. As the name suggests, GADTs broaden the set of type-level constraints that one can encode using ADTs. A canonical example involves using GADTs to strongly type an AST and evaluator function s.t. attempting to construct or operate on an…

lpageAug 6, 2021View on HNParent context

Part of this has to do with the fact that it is not possible (without tricks) to have multiple different typeclass implementations for one type in Haskell (I believe Rust also has this restriction). This language restriction has the tendency to seep into people's way of thinking…

ShoopJan 8, 2021View on HNParent context

As a layman I would describe them as implicits like in current Scala [0] but better (easier to reason about). One thing which they allow is ad-hoc polymorphism like typeclasses. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.01895.pdf https://old.reddit.com/r/ocaml/comments/4qan0w/modular_type_...…

tutanchamunSep 22, 2019View on HNParent context

> No, I mean that neither Elm nor Standard ML has nor needs typeclasses. No language needs typeclasses. Standard ML has less need for type classes because it has a much more expressive module system, but it still can be extremely tedious to pass around module definitions all the…

bjz_Aug 21, 2018View on HNParent context

Gluon recently added implicit arguments with the latest release (see http://marwes.github.io/2018/06/19/gluon-0.8.html). In spirit it is like modular implicits (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.01895.pdf). This is really exciting because modular implicits represent a pragmatic balance…

jdreaverJun 22, 2018View on HNParent context

If by "all constructions wiht HKTs", you mean what can be done with HKTs in Haskell, then I'd say yes. It is well-known that ML modules provide a very advanced level of expressiveness, especially since OCaml's introduction of first-class modules. Also, Scala took this idea…

lptkApr 30, 2018View on HNParent context

If I'm not mistaken, this release is not the multicore release[0]. Also, if anyone's keen on reading the paper behind modular implicits in OCaml, its a fun read - http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01895 [0] - https://blogs.janestreet.com/flambda/#comment-39958

krat0sprakharApr 27, 2016View on HNParent context

This is exactly the problem that modular implicits will solve. See http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.01895.pdf

pauldirac137Apr 28, 2016View on HNParent context

Modules are strictly more powerful than Haskell type classes (at least, more powerful than naive type classes; there are so many extensions that I'm not sure that is still the case). Modular implicits are described here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.01895.pdf. The main problem with…

pauldirac137Mar 31, 2016View on HNParent context

If you don't mind reading a paper, there's a paper on it that actually is readable instead of just all whitepapery and overly-theoretical: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.01895.pdf

ubertacoApr 1, 2016View on HNParent context