Traits
Traits are one way to provide generics or ad-hoc polymorphism.
Dark v1 Problems
Many of the things that relied on "magic" in v1 could be solved with Traits. Thoughts:
- Trait for how to pretty-print for users
- Trait for hooking a value into a visualization system in the editor
- Trait for the SQL query compiler?
- Trait for addition, subtraction, etc
- maybe there's a set of known binops and they have traits defined for each of them
- fromJSON, toJSON
- Should implementations be implicitly derived, or explicitly derived and editable?
Open questions:
- support we have a type A, and users are using type A. Can we add trait B to type A? Probably not, that would change its behaviour. So we'd have to make type A1, with that trait.
- This could cause type explosion, so we'll need to automatically generate ways to convert types to/from different versions that are structurally the same
v2 Spec
v2 Language definition
v2 Standard library