Simon, I'm currently working on a solution to #12144, which changes the way inferred contexts for DeriveAnyClass works, as per your suggestion here [1]. I've made some good progress in that instances derived using DeriveAnyClass now emit contexts that are gathered from the default signatures of the derived class itself. However, I've come to an impasse. This approach currently fails to work with most GHC Generics-style classes, for reasons that I'll explain below. Consider this example (abridged from here [2]): data StrictMaybe a = StrictNothing | StrictJust !a deriving (FullyStrict, Generic) class FullyStrict a where fullyStrict :: proxy a -> Bool default fullyStrict :: (GFullyStrict (Rep a)) => proxy a -> Bool fullyStrict _ = gfullyStrict (Proxy :: Proxy (Rep a p)) With the new approach, the derived FullyStrict instance for StrictMaybe a will emit the context (GFullyStrict (Rep (StrictMaybe a)), but then fail with the error: No instance for (GFullyStrict (Rep (StrictMaybe a)) I think I understand why this is happening: if you look at the definition of tcDeriving in TcDeriv [3], it calls simplifyInstanceContexts, which would normally reduce type families like Rep. But the problem is that the Rep (StrictMaybe a) instance is also being derived at the same time (via the derived Generic instance)! What's worse, the call to simplifyInstanceContexts happens before the code that adds Rep (StrictMaybe a) to the type family instance environment (tcExtendLocalFamInstEnv (bagToList famInsts)). So simplifyInstanceContexts is unable to reduce Rep (StrictMaybe a), and as a result the context fails to simplify, resulting in the above error. This leads me to think we need to be adding Rep (StrictMaybe a) to the instance environment before calling simplifyInstanceContexts. But with the way the code is structured currently, I don't see an easy way to do this. The problem is that the genInst function [4] generates all of the following at the same time in one large bundle: * The instance code itself (InstInfo RdrName) * The associated type family instances (BagDerivStuff) * Auxiliary top-level bindings (BagDerivStuff) And within tcDeriving, the call to genInst takes as input the output of simplifyInstanceContexts, making it impossible to get the type family instances before calling simplifyInstanceContexts. Here are my questions: is it possible to take type family instances out of BagDerivStuff and instead add them to the instance environment before simplifyInstanceContexts? Would there be any typechecking issues involved with having the associated family instances in the local environment before the actual class instances themselves? Ryan S. ----- [1] https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2016-June/012276.html [2] http://git.haskell.org/ghc.git/blob/0050aff22ba04baca732bf5124002417ab667f8a... [3] http://git.haskell.org/ghc.git/blob/0050aff22ba04baca732bf5124002417ab667f8a... [4] http://git.haskell.org/ghc.git/blob/0050aff22ba04baca732bf5124002417ab667f8a...