Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@milessabin
Created September 21, 2011 17:04
Show Gist options
  • Save milessabin/89c9b47a91017973a35f to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save milessabin/89c9b47a91017973a35f to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Unboxed newtype in Scala?
// Compile with -optimize to eliminate boxing/unboxing in specialized
// tag methods.
class User
class Checkin
type Tagged[U] = { type Tag = U }
type @@[T, U] = T with Tagged[U] // Thanks to @retronym for suggesting this type alias
class Tagger[U] {
def apply[T](t : T) : T @@ U = t.asInstanceOf[T @@ U]
}
def tag[U] = new Tagger[U]
// Manual specialization needed here ... specializing apply above doesn't help
def tag[U](i : Int) : Int @@ U = i.asInstanceOf[Int @@ U]
def tag[U](l : Long) : Long @@ U = l.asInstanceOf[Long @@ U]
def tag[U](d : Double) : Double @@ U = d.asInstanceOf[Double @@ U]
def fetch[A](id: Int @@ A): A = null.asInstanceOf[A]
def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
val id = tag[Checkin](10)
fetch[Checkin](id) // Compiles
fetch[User](id) // Does not compile
val ids = tag[User](1) :: tag[User](2) :: tag[User](3) :: Nil
val users : List[(Int @@ User)] = ids // Compiles
val checkins : List[Int @@ Checkin] = ids // Does not compile
}
@iron9light
Copy link

class Gram
class KiloGram
implicit def convert(a: Int with Tagged[KiloGram]): Int with Tagged[Gram] = (a * 1000).asInstanceOf[Int with Tagged[Gram]]
implicit def convert2(b: Int with Tagged[Gram]): Int with Tagged[KiloGram] = (a/1000).asInstanceOf[Int with Tagged[KiloGram]]

It's not useful.

@retronym
Copy link

With a few type aliases for good measure: https://gist.github.com/8fe2c19e4431e817015b

@milessabin
Copy link
Author

@retronym Yup, I like the look of those.

@soc
Copy link

soc commented Sep 22, 2011

Brilliant. I'm just researching how units of measurements can be implemented in Scala. Would it be possible to make this also support unit conversions, e. g. Length * Time == Speed and comparable things?

@milessabin
Copy link
Author

@soc No I don't think it's up to that. The main problem is that eg. Int @@ T <: Int for any T, so the usual arithmetic operators are applicable (via simple subtype conformance of their arguments) and will have their ordinary result type (ie. Int). So, in particular, tagUser+tagCheckin compiles and has the value 36 : Int ... definitely not what you want for UoM.

@adamw
Copy link

adamw commented Nov 25, 2015

I need type tagging only (without shapeless or scalaz) in some projects so I published it as a one-class artifact, if anybody would find that useful as well: https://github.com/softwaremill/scala-common

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment