Strong points

• Separate notions of type witnesses and type representation allows to use many flavours of generic programming, and adapt other libraries (examples include Haskell Scrap your boiler plate, LIGD, Instant-Generics, RepLib). The type representations are called generic views, there is a default one, Generic_core_desc which is low level and is automatically derived using the reify ppx.

• Automatic derivation of the boilerplate for reifying types, using the reify ppx.

• Ad-hoc polymorphism and overloading through type-indexed functions. Implemented as extensible functions over the extensible universe of type witnesses. This also makes it possible to emulate Haskell type-classes.

• Abstract types are respected through a user-provided embedding to convert back and force between the abstract implementation and a public representation.

• Generic traversals are implemented on top of the library and provide powerful combinators to write concise definitions of recursive functions over complex tree types.

• Examples include a type-safe deserialization function that respects type abstraction.

Resources

• Technical Report
• Library Reference

Compatibility

Works with OCaml v.4.04.0