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literal-types

This is a compiler plugin which allows specifying singleton literal types.

About

This project was mainly done as an exercise in creating a compiler plugin. I used kind-projector as the skeleton, so credit goes to that project. I'm really not sure if this is a useful or good idea, but in case you want to play around with it, I published it to bintray:

resolvers += Resolver.bintrayRepo("jeremyrsmith", "maven")
addCompilerPlugin("io.github.jeremyrsmith" %% "literal-types" % "0.1.0")

Scala has a concept of singleton types; that is, the type that is inhabited by only a single value:

val foo = "foo string"

// this function will only accept foo as its argument
def fn(arg: foo.type) = ???

So we can look at the type of foo in different ways, from least to most specific:

  1. Any
  2. AnyRef
  3. String
  4. foo.type

But there is also a notion of constant types, that is, a type whose value is statically known. This is available for certain types - at least String and Int, but possibly others (and notably not Symbol). So the type of foo above has another level to it:

  1. Any
  2. AnyRef
  3. String
  4. String("foo string")
  5. foo.type

These types can't be directly expressed in the Scala language - not because the compiler doesn't know about them, but because the parser just doesn't allow for them to be expressed.

What this compiler plugin does is allow them to be expressed, in a fashion. The caveat is that you'll sacrifice a few classes of type identifiers.

Expressing Literal Types

The plugin works by rewriting certain type identifiers into constant types. Since the types you're expressing aren't legal scala identifiers, they must be encased in backticks, like:

type Foo = `"foo"`

In this case, `"foo"` is replaced with the constant type String("foo"). The backticks are necessary to allow the program to parse. Of course, this means that you won't be able to use that literal name as an identifier for a type. But you wouldn't do that anyway, would you?

The literal types that can be expressed this way are:

  1. String - `"some string"`
  2. Int - `23`
  3. Symbol - `'foo` - Symbol is a special case, because it's not actually a constant type. Therefore, it needs a different strategy for creating that type. Since the only case you would want to use a Symbol singleton literal type is with shapeless, when you specify a symbol type as shown, it's assumed that shapeless is available in the project, and it will be rewritten to i.e. Witness.`'foo`.T, which is shapeless' own syntax for specifying literal types.

The plugin will operate on any such identifier in a type position. That is, you can use such identifiers as names of variables (which again, you shouldn't be doing) but not as names of types.

Again, I'm not sure how useful this idea is, because (as mentioned just above) you can already specify these types using the slightly more arduous Witness.`[literal]`.T syntax of shapeless. The advantage of this plugin might be that (apart from symbol literals) there isn't a dependency on shapeless.