A fast open-union type suitable for 100+ contained alternatives.

This package provides Data.Sum, an open-union type, similar to the Union type that powers the implementation of Oleg Kiselyov's extensible-effects library.

Unlike most open-union implementations, this type is very fast to compile, even when the type-level list of alternatives contains hundreds of entries. Membership queries are constant-time, compiling to a single type-level natural lookup in a closed type family, unlike the traditional encoding of Union, which relies on recursive typeclass lookups. As such, this type lends itself to representing abstract syntax trees or other rich data structures.

This project is safe to use in production. Any performance problems at compile-time or runtime should be filed as bugs.

fastsum

This package provides Data.Sum, an open-union type, similar to the Union type that powers the implementation of Oleg Kiselyov's extensible-effects library.

Unlike most open-union implementations, this type is very fast to compile, even when the type-level list of alternatives contains hundreds of entries. Membership queries are constant-time, compiling to a single type-level natural lookup in a closed type family, unlike the traditional encoding of Union, which relies on recursive typeclass lookups. As such, this type lends itself to representing abstract syntax trees or other rich data structures.

GHC 8's support for custom type errors provides readable type errors should membership constraints not be satisfied.

In order to achieve speed, this package makes fewer guarantees about what can be proven given a Member instance. If you require a richer vocabulary to describe the implications of membership, you should use the traditional implementation of open-unions.

Credits

This library is built on the work of Oleg Kiselyov, which was then modified by Allele Dev. It was extracted from Josh Vera's effects library. Rob Rix implemented the ElemIndex type family and the Apply typeclass.