Unboxed newtype in Scala?

gistfile1.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
}

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?

@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.

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