LexiFi runtime types

It is often useful to get access to types at runtime in order to implement generic type-driven operations. A typical example is a generic pretty-printer. Unfortunately, the OCaml compiler does not keep type information at runtime. At LexiFi, we have extended OCaml to support runtime types. This extension has been in use for years and is now a key element in many of our interesting components, such as our automatic GUI framework (which derives GUIs from type definitions) or our high-level database layer (which derives SQL schema from type definitions, and exposes a well-typed interface for queries). This extension is tightly integrated with the OCaml typechecker, which allows the compiler to synthesize the runtime type representations with minimal input from the programmer.

This package makes the features of our extension available to other OCaml users without relying on a modified compiler. Instead, it only relies on a PPX syntax extension that synthesizes the runtime representation of types from their syntactic definition with a deriving-like approach.

Based on this new implementation we are able to open-source the infrastructure we have developed around the machinery of runtime types as well as libraries built upon them.

Getting started

This package has not been made available on the OPAM repository. You can still use OPAM to install its current version:

opam pin add lrt git://github.com/lexifi/lrt.git

Then, in order to generate runtime representations of your OCaml types, you have to enable the lrt ppx. Your dune file might look like the following.

(executable
  (name foo)
  (libraries bar lrt)
  (preprocess (pps lrt.deriving)))

Now you can use runtime types in your programs:

open Lrt

type nat =
  | Z
  | S of nat
  [@@deriving t]

let () =
  Print.show ~t:nat_t (S (S (S Z)))

Having the basic things set up, you are ready to explore the documentation of the Lrt module.

About

This must be considered a preliminary, potentially unstable release.

The package is is licensed by LexiFi under the terms of the MIT license.

Maintaining

There are four main directories:

• lib contains the runtime type representations and useful modules built atop.
• ppx contains the syntax extension.
• bench contains the json/variant roundtrip benchmark code.
• tests contains the separate tests. Some more tests are placed directly in the corresponding modules.

Some things remain open:

• Except of Json no module uses the latest features of Xtype and Matcher.
• Unify was written before Matcher and uses a different definition of equality.
• git grep TODO

Useful commands:

• View the generated code using dune exec ppx/standalone.exe test/ppx.ml.
• Run tests using dune runtest.
• Format the code using dune build @fmt --auto-promote or make fmt.
• Generate documentation for github pages using make docs, then commit and push to master.