Roman Cheplyaka

traverse-with-class 1.0 release

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I have released the 1.0 version of traverse-with-class. This library generalizes many Foldable and Traversable functions to heterogeneous containers such as records.

For instance, you can apply Show to all fields and collect the results:

{-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell, MultiParamTypeClasses, FlexibleInstances,
             ConstraintKinds, UndecidableInstances, TypeApplications #-}

import Data.Generics.Traversable
import Data.Generics.Traversable.TH

data User a = User
 { name :: String
 , age  :: Int
 , misc :: a
 }

deriveGTraversable ''User

allFields = gfoldMap @Show (\x -> [show x]) $ User "Alice" 22 True
-- ["\"Alice\"","22","True"]

You also get a free zipper for your data types.

The main change in the version 1.0 is that the constraint with which the traversal is conducted is specified via a visible type application. Type applications weren’t available when I originally wrote this library in 2013, so in that version I used implicit parameters to pass around the annoying proxies.

Thanks to Hao Lian for his help with this transition.

Right after I published this blog post, I saw this tweet:

Guess what, traverse-with-class provides the sensible Foldable-like instance for tuples:

{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleInstances, TypeApplications #-}

import Data.Generics.Traversable

-- U is a trivial constraint satisfied by all types
class U a
instance U a

tupleLength = gfoldl' @U (\c _ -> c + 1) 0 (1::Int, True)
-- returns 2