Defunctionalization helpers.
The package defun
provides defunctionalization helpers, most importantly type family DeFun.Core.App
allowing to write higher-order type families. The singletons
package also has its own type family Apply
, but the machinery is tied to the Sing
/ singletons.
Once UnsaturatedTypeFamilies
extension is implemented in GHC (Proposal 242), this package will become more or less obsolete.
In particular, the Lam
counterpart SLambda
is specialized to Sing
arguments. The defun
's Lam
is however fully general, so you can use your own singletons or (importantly) singleton-like arguments.
The package provides few defunctionalized functions, and their term-level reflections using SBool
and NP
data types from singletons-bool
and sop-core
packages respectively.
This is the "batteries-included" variant with "many" dependencies; see the defun-core
package and other defun-*
dependencies if you need a more limited dependency footprint.
The first-class-families package has slightly different design, in particular it doesn't reuse existing (nor define) own standalone type families. In first-class-families
everything has to be evaluated via its Eval
type family (which job is similar to App
), but defun
only makes higher-order type families look different. In short, ergonomics are a bit different.