Comparing Libraries For Generic Programming In Haskell

Alexey Rodriguez, Johan Jeuring, Patrik Jansson, Alex Gerdes, Oleg Kiselyov, Bruno C. D. S. Oliveira. Comparing Libraries for Generic Programming in Haskell? . Submitted to ICFP 2008.

Datatype-generic programming is defining functions that depend on the structure, or ``shape'', of datatypes. It has been around for more than 10 years, and a lot of progress has been made, in particular in the lazy functional programming language Haskell. There are more than 10 proposals for generic programming libraries or language extensions for Haskell. To compare and characterize the many generic programming libraries in a typed functional language, we introduce a set of criteria and develop a generic programming benchmark: a set of characteristic examples testing various facets of datatype-generic programming. We have implemented the benchmark for nine existing Haskell generic programming libraries and present the evaluation of the libraries. The comparison is useful for reaching a common standard for generic programming, but also for a programmer who has to choose a particular approach for datatype-generic programming.

Paper (submitted to Haskell Symposium 2008): pdf

Technical report (contains detailed evaluation, slightly outdated): link

NEW Updated technical report (3rd September 2008): pdf

Benchmark suite

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/GPBench

BibTex?

BibTex? for the technical report.

@techreport{Rodriguez:2008,
  Author =       {Rodriguez, Alexey and Jeuring, Johan and Jansson, Patrik and Gerdes, Alex and Kiselyov, Oleg\
 and Oliveira, Bruno C. d. S.},
  Institution =  {Utrecht University},
  Number =       {UU-CS-2008-010},
  Title =        {Comparing Libraries for Generic Programming in Haskell},
  Year =         2008
}