#9757: Warn about derivable instances -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: dfeuer | Owner: Type: feature | Status: new request | Milestone: Priority: normal | Version: 7.9 Component: Compiler | Keywords: Resolution: | Architecture: Unknown/Multiple Operating System: | Difficulty: Unknown Unknown/Multiple | Blocked By: Type of failure: | Related Tickets: None/Unknown | Test Case: | Blocking: | Differential Revisions: | -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Comment (by dfeuer): Replying to [comment:1 goldfire]:
To my knowledge, GHC can ''not'' derive instances better than anyone else. Since the advent of `coerce`, `GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving` has no magic -- any GND instance can be written by hand, sometimes with lots of type annotations and `ScopedTypeVariables`, though.
I don't ''think'' this is exactly right. As I understand it, `coerce` should let you hand-build an exact ''copy'' of an existing dictionary, but `GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving` lets you actually ''reuse'' the dictionary.
Personally, I would want to see nice definitions of "obviously" and "equivalent" before thinking too much harder about this. This seems hard to do and not terribly useful, to me.
It's useful because GHC can derive a lot more things today than in olden times, and there's a lot of old code that hasn't noticed yet. The notion of "obviously" is to recognize plain wrap/unwrap patterns, preferably with enough flexibility to handle both pattern-matching versions and `(.)` versions and maybe even a little inlining. The scare quotes around "equivalent" were to recognize the potential for arity mismatches—a hand- written version may guarantee a certain arity that the GND-derived version does not. {{{#!hs newtype Foo m = Foo m instance Monoid m => Monoid Foo m where mempty = Foo mempty Foo x `mappend` Foo y = Foo (x `mappend` y) }}} I'd want this to be recognized as derivable even though it guarantees that `mappend _|_ = const _|_ /= _|_` while the GND-derived instance would not make such a guarantee. -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/9757#comment:2 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler