Type-Safe Datatype-Generic Programming in F#

Datatype-generic programming is a powerful technique that allows you to parameterise your functions by the shape of the types that they are invoked with. A simple example of datatype-generic programming is a pretty-printer for arbitrary record types – it inspects the structure of the record type at runtime to find its fields and then prints the value of each field in turn.

In .NET languages, datatype-generic programming is typically achieved through a combination of generic type parameters and reflection, but this method suffers from the proliferation of obj values and therefore unsafe code.

In this talk, we’ll take a look at three libraries:

• TypeEquality - ahttps://github.com/G-Research/TypeEquality

• HCollections - ahttps://github.com/nickcowle/HCollections

• TeqCrate - ahttps://github.com/nickcowle/TeqCrate

We’ll show that when taken together, these libraries offer a type-safe abstraction layer over simple reflection. By using them, we can create our own libraries that are not only type-safe with respect to their public API, but whose internal implementations are completely type-safe as well.

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