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README
HVector
This is a package for type safe heterogenous vectors, or HVector
s. This library was developed to allow the HLearn library to handle multivariate distributions---each data point is an HVector, and the trained multivariate distribution will also be an HVector. This might be of more general interest, however, and so has been separated into its own library. It is called vector-heterogenous on hackage.
Construction
The simplest way to construct an HVector
is from an HList
with the vec
function. For example, we can run:
ghci> import Data.Vector.Heterogenous
ghci> let hvec = vec ShowBox $ "test":::Nothing:::([4,5,6],()):::HNil
This declaration contains two parts. To the right of the $
we have the HList
of our data. Notice that any type is allowed. The first argument of vec
is the constructor for an "existential box" that we want to put these elements in. We will call this constructor on each element in the HList
in order to make them all of one type. We then store these homogenous types into a standard vector from Data.Vector
.
Since we used ShowBox
in our hvec
variable, we can print hvec
to the screen:
ghci> hvec
vec ShowBox $ "test":::Nothing:::([4,5,6],()):::HNil
The type of our HVector
has two components as well. First is the type of box we use, and second is the list of which type corresponds to which value in the vector.
ghci> :t hvec
(Num b) => HVector ShowBox '[String,Maybe a,([b],())]
Advantages over HLists
The advantage of an HVector
over an HList
is that we get O(1) indexing anywhere in the list. (Technically the type checker still takes time O(n), but run time takes only O(1).) We use the view
function to do this:
ghci> hvec `view` (undefined :: Sing 0)
"test"
ghci> hvec `view` (undefined :: Sing 1)
Nothing
ghci> hvec `view` (undefined :: Sing 2)
([4,5,6],())
Unfortunately, this is slightly awkward because we must make our accessor function polymorphic on the index. Maybe someone with a better knowledge of a lens library's internals could come up with a prettier interface.
Advantages over straight ExistentialQuantification
There are two advantages. First, as we have seen, we can recover the original type for each index with our view
function. This would not be possible if we used a type of V.Vector ShowBox
.
Second, HVector
also has a Monoid
instance. That means we can do:
ghci> hvec<>hvec
vec ShowBox $ "testtest":::Nothing:::([4,5,6,4,5,6],())::HNil
With straight existential quantification, it would not be possible to merge the corresponding positions in each vector because they are not guaranteed to be the same type.
Performance
Use of the view
function above is not ideal for performance critical applications because it prevents fusion. The easiest way to work around this is to directly access the underlying vector of existential boxes. We do this with the getvec
function:
ghci> :t getvec
getvec :: HVector box xs -> Vector box
ghci> getvec hvec
fromList [([4,5,6],()),Nothing,"test"]
Notice that elements will now be accessed in reverse order.
Now the compiler can use fusion and everything runs quite zippy. The trick to making this work well is creating a good existential box for your specific application. In the HLearn library, for example, we would use a DatapointBox and a DistributionBox to represent our data points and multivariate distributions.
Based on my tests, a variable of type HVector ShowBox '[Int,Int,Int,Int,Int,...]
performs the same as the standard Data.Vector.Vector Int
. The HVector
has an extra layer of boxing to deal with, but using BangPatterns and -funbox-strict-fields
the compiler can remove this from the generated code.