Re: Add NonEmptyMap and NonEmptySet to containers

On 2019-04-18 11:00 p.m., David Feuer wrote:

I'm in favor of the proposal. I find the isomorphism between Map (a,b) v and Map a (NonemptyMap b v) very pleasant. The fact that others have written less-performant implementations of this idea is rather convincing. The fact that doing this removes partial matches in the implementation is nice. And I'll take performance improvements where I can get them. The main question is the proper name of the type. Just Data.Map.Nonempty.Map, or .NonemptyMap? Should the empty be capitalized?

There seems to be a consensus for Data.Map.NonEmpty.NEMap, with the type and the functions slightly off the regular ones. This design would make it easier to use regular and non-empty containers together, but it be annoying for the use case of replacing all uses of an existing regular container with a non-empty one. I'd rather change just the import declaration than all occurrences of the type name and functions. I don't want to derail the implementation with bikeshedding, so I'm just going to ask why not both? The library can both export the tweaked names and add a module, say Data.NonEmpty.Map.Lazy, that exports the type synonym Map = NEMap. It would also rename all the functions back to their names from Data.Map.Lazy.

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 7:15 PM John Cotton Ericson wrote:

In https://github.com/haskell/containers/issues/608 I proposed adding non-empty variants of Map and Set, analogous to Data.List.NonEmpty for List, to containers. semigroupoids demonstrates the many uses and structure of non-empty containers in general, and libraries such as https://github.com/mstksg/nonempty-containers and https://github.com/andrewthad/non-empty-containers demonstrate the interest in non-empty maps and sets in particular. My favorite use-case is that they're needed to "curry" containers: for example, |Map (k0, k1) v| is isomorphic not to |Map k0 (Map k1 v)| but to |Map k0 (NonEmptyMap k1 v)|. I like this use-case because it comes from the containers themselves.

Importantly, there's no good way to do this outside of containers; doing so leads to imbalancing / extra indirection, or massive code duplication. If one wraps the container was an extra value like Data.List.NonEmpty, one's left with an unavoidable extra indirection/imbalance. One can rectify this by copying and modifying the implementation of containers, but that's hardly maintainable; even as though the algorithms are the same, enough lines are touched that merging upstream containers is nigh impossible.

On the other hand, the non-empty containers can be elegantly and sufficiently implemented alongside their originals by taking the Bin constructor and breaking it out into it's own type, mutually recursive with the original. This avoids the indirection/imbalancing and code duplication problems: the algorithms work exactly as before creating the same trees (remember the UNPACK), and no code duplicated since the functions become mutually recursive matching the types.

To briefly summarize the thread:

1. I proposed the issue after performing this same refactor on the dependent-map package: https://github.com/obsidiansystems/dependent-map/tree/non-empty, a fork of containers. 2. I made https://github.com/haskell/containers/pull/616 which just changes the types, to make sure UNPACK preserved the importance. 3. https://gist.github.com/Ericson2314/58709d0d99e0c0e83ad266701cd71841 the benchmarks showed rather than degrading performance, PR 616 actually /improved/ it.

 If there is preliminary consensus, I'll make a second PR on top which generalizes the functions like on my dependent-map branch.

Thanks,

John

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