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Alloy: Fast generic transformations for Haskell
Neil C.C. Brown and Adam T. Sampson
In Haskell '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN Haskell Symposium, pages 182-196, September 2009.Abstract
Data-type generic programming can be used to traverse and manipulate specific parts of large heterogeneously-typed tree structures, without the need for tedious boilerplate. Generic programming is often approached from a theoretical perspective, where the emphasis lies on the power of the representation rather than on efficiency. We describe use cases for a generic system derived from our work on a nanopass compiler, where efficiency is a real concern, and detail a new generics approach (Alloy) that we have developed in Haskell to allow our compiler passes to traverse the abstract syntax tree quickly. We benchmark our approach against several other Haskell generics approaches and statistically analyse the results, finding that Alloy is fastest on heterogeneously-typed trees.
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@inproceedings{2954,
author = {Neil C.C. Brown and Adam T. Sampson},
title = {{A}lloy: Fast Generic Transformations for {H}askell},
month = {September},
year = {2009},
pages = {182-196},
keywords = {determinacy analysis, Craig interpolants},
note = {},
doi = {},
url = {http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2009/2954},
publication_type = {inproceedings},
submission_id = {5676_1254754046},
ISBN = {978-1-60558-508-6},
booktitle = {Haskell '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN Haskell Symposium},
refereed = {yes},
}