What does a humped critter have to teach us?

Published on September 29, 2019

While attending the MigareOS hack retreat in Marrakesh (Morocco) I met some interesting people and learned a couple of new things. In particular, I met a creature I had never met before—Camel, the ship of desert.

I will never forget the calm and profound look of that camel. Sage eyes of the animal expressed little interest in me, as well as in mundane details of the situation in general. Some may think that it’s sheer arrogance on his part and I concur. But the camel has serious reasons to look arrogant, even though he is not as pure as some and his life is not the easiest, for he lives in the desert.

OCaml and Haskell

OCaml and Haskell may be closer to each other than to any other popular programming languages, some differences are:

OCaml is strict, while Haskell is lazy , err… non-strict.

, err… non-strict. OCaml has polymorphic variants and objects, which are essentially a form of row-types. On the other hand, Haskell has a few unique features of its own.

OCaml has an interesting approach to the organization of its modules.

In my opinion, the module system is the most remarkable feature of OCaml. This is why I’m going to talk only about it in this post. It’s also a good opportunity to see how it relates to Haskell’s type classes.

Simple example

Let’s start with an example. A simple module containing a type for something like Haskell’s Text could look like this:

type t = ... (* OCaml programmers rarely add type annotations to functions *) let empty = ... let singleton char = ... let index text n = ... let length text = ...

The t type is a common idiom in OCaml. Modules are usually fine-grained, so that every type gets its own module. Later we will see more reasons for doing it this way.

A Haskeller might think now of what bothers Haskellers the most: if every type gets its own module, how long is the typical import section of a module? The answer is: around 1 or 2 lines!

Suppose we store the module above in a file called text.ml , then we can refer to the text type as Text.t and to the functions as e.g. Text.empty . You only use top-level open (analogous to Haskell’s simple, unqualified import ) for very few selected modules specially designed to be “opened” globally. It usually includes a sort of prelude. Everything else is accessed by specifying the name of the module locally, and who can argue that this is not a good practice?

OCaml has some nice syntax to encourage opening modules locally:

let average x y = let open Int64 in x + y / of_int 2

Here, we can refer to Int64.(/) as (/) and to Int64.of_int as of_int inside of let open . The alternative syntax uses parentheses to do the same:

let average x y = Int64 .(x + y / of_int 2 )

Module signature and implementation

Another detail is that we do not see an export section in the snippet above. In fact, OCaml keeps module signatures separated from module implementations. Module signatures are usually stored in a different file with extension .mli . text.mli in our case could look like this:

type t val empty : t val singleton : char -> t val index : t -> int -> char val length : t -> int

Module signatures work as a boundary that hides implementation details. For example, above we just say that the type we operate on is t and we do not export its constructors (that would happen if we wrote = with definition after type t ), so it stays abstract.

What’s more, the relation between module signatures and module implementations is exactly the same as between types and values. We could define a module signature in a standalone fashion like this:

module type Text = sig type t val empty : t val singleton : char -> t val index : t -> int -> char val length : t -> int end

A particular module implementation may or may not match the signature. An implementation matches if it declares all the mentioned types and values and their signatures match, provided that the abstract type t is substituted with its “real” implementation type.

Functors

Functors are functions from module to module (although functors and functions do not share the same syntax). For example:

module type Eq = sig type t val eq : t -> t -> bool end module EqFromIndexed (Elt : Eq) (I : sig type t val index : t -> int -> Elt.t val length : t -> int end ) : (Eq with type t := I.t) = struct type t = I.t let eq x y = let len_x = I.length x in let len_y = I.length y in let rec go i = if i < len_x then I.index x i = I.index y i && go (i + 1 ) else true in if len_x = len_y then go 0 else false end

Here we first defined the type signature Eq which captures the necessary minimum for talking about equality of things: the type t and the equality function eq . Then we defined the functor EqFromIndexed which takes the module Elt : Eq providing an equality check for elements, as well as the module I providing two functions index and length . This allows us to check if two indexable containers are equal by simply traversing all elements. The definition of EqFromIndexed also features an anonymous module signature.

The Eq with type t := I.t annotation helps to avoid having an abstract t type in the module produced by the functor, making sure that it is the same as the I.t type from the argument module. Interested readers can find more information about these subtle details here.

We now apply EqFromIndexed to an anonymous module providing the eq for char s and Text that we already have:

module TextEq = EqFromIndexed ( struct type t = char let eq = Char .equal end ) (Text)

Now we have a way to generate the equality function TextEq.eq for any given type that can satisfy the requirements imposed by the arguments of EqFromIndexed .

Type classes

Let’s consider an analogous setup in Haskell:

{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleContexts #-} {-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies #-} import Prelude hiding ( length ) import Data.Kind ( Type ) class Indexed a where type Elt a :: Type index :: a -> Int -> Elt a length :: a -> Int eqFromIndexed :: ( Eq ( Elt a ) , Indexed a ) => a -> a -> Bool eqFromIndexed x y = if len_x == len_y then go 0 else False where len_x = length x len_y = length y go i = if i < len_x then index x i == index y i && go ( i + 1 ) else True

Type classes allow us to work in a similar framework where certain properties (i.e. functions, methods of classes) are first defined from scratch and then other functions can be built if a certain interface can be satisfied ( EqFromIndexed in OCaml and eqFromIndexed in Haskell).

Now the principle “one module per type” should make more sense. A module can be considered as a collection of all defined operations for a particular type t inside it, like collection of all methods of all type classes for a type.

Comparison

I think OCaml may be doing better than Haskell here. Here are some thoughts:

Naming convention. As you can see, with OCaml’s approach naming matters. If a module follows the conventions it can often be passed to a functor without having to define another module that can act as a bridge to satisfy the naming convention that a functor expects. This makes names in modules more predictable.

Complexity. Type classes are a heavy feature in Haskell. It complicates things instead of keeping the system flat and simple. Look at, say, associated type families. You have normal “standalone” type families and then type families associated with a type class. Following OCaml’s strategy we would have just 1 level instead of 2. OCaml already essentially has associated types (remember Elt.t ?) and it’s simply a consequence of the fact that it has type definitions and the structure of its module system.

Efficiency. OCaml’s module system reminds me of Haskell’s backpack. In OCaml land there is one problem less performance-wise. At least in theory, generating new functions with functors should produce fully specialized efficient code, sparing us of the fear that excessive polymorphism will make our code 100 times slower.

There are no orphans in the desert land. OCaml’s approach does not lead to orphan or overlapping instances because unlike Haskell’s type classes it doesn’t promise to establish a one-to-one correspondence between types and values/functions. Which leads us to…

Type classes as a way to go from type level to value level. In modern Haskell type classes are often used to get a value (functions are also values in this context) associated with a type. Here, type class definition establishes what sort of value you can get, and instances define actual values, one per type. If we accept that coherence of instance resolution is useful, then we could argue that OCaml doesn’t have such a mechanism. Edward Kmett likes this a lot. But I’d say it’s not a problem of module system vs type classes. If we have dependent types, we also can compute values form types, although such an approach will be “closed”, as opposed to the “open” system with type classes where new instances always can be added.

Conclusion

OCaml’s modules are first-class values. They allow the language to be simple yet expressive without the need for type classes providing a typed framework on a higher level and making it easier to generate performant code.

This post is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to the OCaml module system, so I’m not showing some usages, such as nesting modules in a single file or actually passing modules as values (partly to cut the size of the post, partly because I do not yet understand how this is useful). If you want to learn OCaml or just read about its features, try Real World OCaml.

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