Usage of generic programming on hackage: experience report

  • Authors:
  • Nikolaos Bezirgiannis;Johan Jeuring;Sean Leather

  • Affiliations:
  • Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands;Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands;Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Generic programming
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Generic programming language constructs, tools and libraries have been available in Haskell since the first report on the programming language Haskell. At the beginning of the 1990s generic programming techniques could be used via the deriving construct, and since then numerous generic programming libraries and tools have been developed. At the time of writing, the categories `generic' and 'generics' on Hackage, the online repository of Haskell software, contain 53 packages. Although not all of these are generic programming libraries or tools, there are many approaches to generic programming to choose from. This brief paper discusses an analysis of the usage of generic programming language constructs, tools, and libraries. We analyse how often which language constructs, tools, and libraries are used on Hackage, how often class instances are derived generically or written manually, and for some libraries, how often the functions that appear in these libraries are used.