I thought I’d take some time to respond to some of the concerns raised about my recent Higher-Kinded Data and Free Lenses for Higher-Kinded Data posts.

Deriving Instances for HKD

One of the biggest concerns over the HKD technique was that it breaks automated deriving of instances. This is not entirely true, it just requires turning on {-# LANGUAGE StandaloneDeriving #-} and then using one of two approaches.

The simplest method is that we can simply derive all of our instances only for the types we expect to use:

deriving instance Eq ( Person' Identity ) deriving instance Eq ( Person' Maybe ) deriving instance Ord ( Person' Identity ) deriving instance Ord ( Person' Maybe )

Admittedly it’s kind of a shit solution, but technically it does work.

An alternative approach is to automatically lift these instances from f a over the HKD f a type family. The construction is a little more involved than I want to get into today, but thankfully it’s available as library code from the spiffy one-liner package.

After adding one-liner as a dependency, we can lift our instances over a polymorphic f using the Constraints type-synonym:

deriving instance ( Constraints ( Person' f) Eq ) => Eq ( Person' f) f)f)

Easy!

Runtime Performance

The other big concern was over whether we pay performance costs for getting so many cool things for free.

For the most part, if you mark all of your generic type-class methods as INLINE and turn on -O2 , most of the time you’re not going to pay any runtime cost for using the HKD technique.

Don’t believe me? I can prove it, at least for our free lenses.

Let’s fire up the inspection-testing package, which allows us to write core-level equalities that we’d like the compiler to prove for us. The equality we want to show is that the core generated for using our free lenses is exactly what would be generated by using hand-written lenses.

We can do this by adding some front-matter to our module:

{-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell #-} {-# OPTIONS_GHC -O -fplugin Test.Inspection.Plugin #-} import Test.Inspection

This installs the inspection-testing compiler plugin, which is responsible for doing the work for us. Next, we’ll define our lenses:

freeName :: Lens' ( Person' Identity ) String Person ( LensFor freeName) _ = getLenses freeName) _getLenses handName :: Lens' ( Person' Identity ) String = a2fb (pName s) <&> \b -> s { pName = b } handName a2fb sa2fb (pName s)\bs { pNameb }

and finally, we can write the equalities we’d like GHC to prove for us. This is done in two steps – writing top-level left- and right- handed sides of the equality, and then writing a TemplateHaskell splice to generate the proof.

viewRhs :: Person' Identity -> String viewLhs, = view freeName viewLhsview freeName = view handName viewRhsview handName $ 'viewLhs === 'viewRhs inspect'viewLhs'viewRhs

Compiling this dumps some new information into our terminal:

src/Main.hs:34:1: viewLhs === viewRhs passed. inspection testing successful expected successes: 1

We can write an analogy equality to ensure that the generated setter code is equivalent:

setRhs :: String -> Person' Identity -> Person' Identity setLhs, = freeName .~ y setLhs yfreeName = handName .~ y setRhs yhandName $ 'setLhs === 'setRhs inspect'setLhs'setRhs

And upon compiling this:

src/Main.hs:34:1: viewLhs === viewRhs passed. src/Main.hs:35:1: setLhs === setRhs passed. inspection testing successful expected successes: 2

Cool! Just to satisfy your curiosity, the actual lenses themselves aren’t equivalent:

results in a big core dump showing that freeName is a gross disgusting chain of fmap s and that handName is pretty and elegant. And the module fails to compile, which is neat – it means we can write these proofs inline and the compiler will keep us honest if we ever break them.

But what’s cool here is that even though our lenses do not result in equivalent code, actually using them does – which means that under most circumstances, we won’t be paying to use them.