At the moment the Trees that Grow implementation in GHC master makes use of massive constraint types to provide Data instances for the hsSyn AST.

I am trying to remove the need for this, and have hit a problem.

The example I have reduced it to is here [1]

The essence of the problem is

-------------------
data Experiment p
  = Experiment {
      e_ext :: (XEOverLit p),
      e_val :: Int }
  | XExperiment (XXOverLit p)
deriving instance (Data (GhcPass p)) => Data (Experiment (GhcPass p))

type family XEOverLit  x
type family XXOverLit x

-- The following line works
-- type instance XEOverLit (GhcPass _) = PlaceHolder

-- The following 3 lines do noe
type instance XEOverLit (GhcPass 'Parsed     ) = PlaceHolder
type instance XEOverLit (GhcPass 'Renamed    ) = PlaceHolder
type instance XEOverLit (GhcPass 'Typechecked) = PlaceHolder

type instance XXOverLit (GhcPass _) = PlaceHolder
-------------------

Where specifying the type instance with a wild card keeps GHC happy (the XXOverLit case), but specifying for each of the three constructors for pass does not (the XEOverLit case)

The exact error message is

------------------------------

Experiment.hs:34:1: error:
    • Could not deduce (Data (XEOverLit (GhcPass p)))
        arising from a use of ‘k’
      from the context: Data (GhcPass p)
        bound by the instance declaration at Experiment.hs:34:1-69
    • In the first argument of ‘k’, namely ‘(z Experiment `k` a1)’
      In the expression: ((z Experiment `k` a1) `k` a2)
      In an equation for ‘gfoldl’:
          gfoldl k z Experiment a1 a2 = ((z Experiment `k` a1) `k` a2)
      When typechecking the code for ‘gfoldl’
        in a derived instance for ‘Data (Experiment (GhcPass p))’:
        To see the code I am typechecking, use -ddump-deriv
   |
34 | deriving instance (Data (GhcPass p)) => Data (Experiment (GhcPass p))
   | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
------------------------------

Alan

[1] http://lpaste.net/360017