| Datatype-generic programming has been around for more than 10 years now. We think a lot of progress has been made in the last decade. As an example, there are more than 10 proposals for generic-programming libraries or language extensions just for the lazy functional-programming language Haskell. Although generic programming has been applied in several applications, it lacks users for real-life projects. This is understandable. Developing a large application takes a couple of years, and choosing a particular approach to generic programming for such a project involves a risk. Few approaches that have been developed over the last decade are still supported, and there is a high risk that the chosen approach will not be supported anymore, or that it will change in a backwards-incompatible way in a couple of years time. We propose to create an environment that supports developing real-life applications using generic-programming techniques. We will focus on developing: - a library or a mixture of a library with a language extension for which we will guarantee continuing support. - an example of a real-life application fundamentally using generic-programming techniques. This application will serve as a showcase for generic-programming support for software development and evolution. - generic-programming design patterns. The usage of the generic-programming techniques in real-life projects will exhibit recurrent patterns, and will give valuable advice for and help with developing other applications using generic-programming techniques. Thus we will show how generic programming can be used to develop powerful tools in little time, and that the resulting tools are easy to maintain, adapt, and reuse. |
