iconv-typed: An experiment in API design and type safety

Posted in: haskell, fp.

Summary: I'm releasing a type safe version of the iconv library, discussing my API design choices and asking for feedback from the community.

I’m slowly making progress in an Haskell piece table library which could be used as a high performant data structure for text manipulation. The typical use case there would be writing a text editor in Haskell, something I had in the back of my mind doing (for fun) for a while.

So far the assumption I have made whilst developing it is that user text would be encoded/decoded as UTF-8 , but in the real world, though, this is simply not true! That’s where encoding comes into play. I won’t get into too much detail about the piece table library (is not that interesting in its current shape!), but this should set the scene on why I needed text encoding in the first place.

In Haskell we have a couple of choices when dealing with text encoding: we can use some functions provided directly by the text library, use the encoding library or use Duncan Coutt’s iconv library. I really like iconv because it has such a simple API and it doesn’t assume anything on the input: the latter is given as a “blob of binary data” and it’s up to me to decide how to interpret it.

Despite its simplicity, I always thought the library also had great potential for things to go wrong: first of all, an EncodingName is simply a String , which the programmer can mispell and spend hours debugging why is program in producing garbage. Secondly, it requires the manual step of retrieving the list of available encodings from the system, typically piggybacking on the underlying C/GNU library. This is why today I’m releasing iconv-typed mainly to gather feedback from the community. It’s such a simply abstraction over iconv I’m surprised nobody thought about something similar, but maybe that’s because it’s so simple people have wrote it in their own projects without releasing it, or simply because maybe it has shortcomings I haven’t anticipated!

A taste of the API

APIwise, the library should feel familiar with the original iconv . Compare this short example using the iconv library:

With the equivalent in iconv-typed :

As you can see it’s almost identical except for the fact we are using TypeApplication ’s @ operator. If we mispelled by accident UTF-8 , we would get a type error. Profit! But how does it work?

Type families to the rescue!

Conceptually, it’s very simple: it fetches all the available encodings in a platform-dependent way (mainly invoking iconv -l under the hood), and then generates a closed type family via template Haskell to basically constrain the Symbol universe only to ones matching a valid encoding. A code snippet will demostrate this much better! We first commit the biggest sin in the whole Haskell universe and we get the encodings via unsafePerformIO [1] (it requires the Shelly library):

… and then we generate the type family where each instance would look like this:

Note two things: we are using a closed type family to avoid “monkey patching” of our encodings (something which could happen if we chose a typeclass as an abstraction mechanism, as someone could have defined an orphan instance) and we “plug” directly each retrieved encoding as a string literal. So far so good! The “magic” between the minimal API lies in this few lines of code:

First of all, we define a type synonym called Enc with 2 phantom types, which will be “filled” by our encodings. This unfortunately generate ambiguity and GHC reports this at compile time. We can help the ambiguity resolving by using AllowAmbiguousTypes , which basically (check this insigthful comment on Reddit for the full explanation. Thanks /u/int_index !)

The convert function has a bit of an intimidating, so let’s start from the typeclass constraints: what I’m saying here is that for any genering k1 and k2 I want those to:

Be an instance of KnownSymbol (think about a String at the type level) so I can reify them back at the value level with reifyEncoding (which is basically just symbolVal under the hood).

The type-level function ValidEncoding must yield True . Simply put, this will only be possibly with the Symbol s I have defined an instance for in my closed type family. This is what will prevent you from passing an input a non-existing or mispelled encoding.

The input ByteString is well, just a ByteString in disguise. Remember Enc ? That’s basically it, with the only twist of carrying these 2 extra types around, which I’m also saying they are of type Symbol , and this is where I need TypeInType , as Symbol would normally be a Kind .

This is the gist of it! But why am I able to invoke the convert function like this?

Here is TypeApplications in action! What we are doing is giving an hint to the compiler about which types are k1 and k2 , as the only real input is the input Enc k1 k2 . Other way to see this, is that we are saying “Hey GHC, Enc carries the utterly generic & ambiguous k1 and k2 , I’m telling you explicitly what those 2 are”.

That’s pretty much it, really!

Usability: the unknown

Something I still have no clue is how practical to use this library will be, mostly because those encodings don’t exist at the value level. But not only that, is also very likely you have some existing code which is doing any kind of manipulation with the EncodingName , like comparing them, reading them from disk, from user input, etc. After all, they are only String s. I suspect doing the equivalent with this library will be clunky, although I hope TypeInType can help in this regard.

You said API design?

The current API is the result of multiple iterations. Initially I was going to use a much simpler approach and simply have my TH code generate plain types so that our API could look like:

This was jolly good for the simplest encodings, but I quickly run into limitations in the allowed characters to be used for a type/type constructor. For example, - is not allowed, so I could have the choice of mangling UTF-8 into UTF_8 , which would have been OK. But what about ISO_646.IRV:1991 ? I quickly realised this approach had 2 problems:

It would require the user to “lookup” the mangled name of Haddock as I couldn’t come up with a mnemonic rule for translating encoding into types

Converting original iconv code would have been a bit painful.

In my opinion, if you are releasing a library which is meant to simplify user life, you really want to aim for a low entry barrier!

Second attempt: Use an ancilliary E type

My second attempt is basically what I ended up releasing as the “GHC 7.x” API version. It does work, but when I first releases the library and I tweeted the link to GitHub, Anthony Cowley gave valuable suggestions on how to improve it, which made me realise that if I was going to use TypeApplications and therefore tap into GHC 8.x anyway, I had access to TypeInType also! That yielded a much nicer API.

Final attempt: Perfection?

Exploring the solution space brought me in a place where I feel I have come up with an API which strikes me as a good compromise. The only sour taste in my mouth is the use of AllowAmbiguousTypes , which I wasn’t able to avoid.

Support for GHC 7.x

Althought not as slick and elegant as the version which uses TypeInType and TypeApplications , we support older versions of GHC. This is how the API would look like if you try to compile iconv-typed with GHC 7.x:

Unexplored territory

As a result of my encoding fetching at compile time, there is something which is subtle and with an impact I cannot anticipate: If you try to run a program which is using iconv-typed on a machine which doesn’t support a particular encoding, your application won’t compile.

Differently put, if you are doomed to produce garbage as part of your encoding process because your underlying iconv library doesn’t support that particular encoding, the library will prevent you from even trying. This could certainly be terrifying or beautiful, depending from the point of view.

I guess we will have to wait and see!

Notes

[1] Using unsafePerformIO here is not necessary, using runIO in the Q monad would have worked as well, and avoid unsafe operations.

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