Generic Programming in OCaml

Abstract

We present a library for generic programming in OCAML, adapting some techniques borrowed from other functional languages. The library makes use of three recent additions to OCAML: generalised abstract datatypes are essential to reflect types, extensible variants allow this reflection to be open for new additions, and extension points provide syntactic sugar and generate boiler plate code that simplify the use of the library. The building blocks of the library can be used to support many approaches to generic programming through the concept of view. Generic traversals are implemented on top of the library and provide powerful combinators to write concise definitions of recursive functions over complex tree types. Our case study is a type-safe deserialisation function that respects type abstraction.This work was partially supported by the Secure-OCaml FUI project. 1 The library is available at https://github.com/balez/generic

Putting Gradual Types to Work

“…The languages closest to BCL are statically typed functional languages with type inference, such as SML, OCaml, and Haskell. OCaml has incorporated dynamic typing at the library level by leveraging its support for generalized algebraic data types [3]. Similarly, Haskell supports a dynamic type as a derivative of the Typeable type class, which uses reflection [13] to look at the runtime representation of types.…”

“…node exactly once. 3 The result of this is the same as originally intended by S&V's copy_dyn function. That is, we ensure there is a unique ?…”