Type information is lost when working with high-kinded objects in Scala

Question

I am trying to factorize some code and ended up having to work with higher-kinded types. The following minimal example works fine:

trait Builder[M[_]] {
    def build[A]: M[A]
    def buildPair[A, B]: (M[A], M[B]) = (build[A], build[B])
}

class List[A]

class BuilderList extends Builder[List] {
    def build[A] = new List[A]
}

val l: List[String] = (new BuilderList).build[String]

val ll: (List[String], List[Double]) = (new BuilderList).buildPair[String, Double]

defined trait Builder
defined class List
defined class BuilderList
l: List[String] = List@5c7754a7
ll: (List[String], List[Double]) = (List@62874648,List@7b0f6537)

If I now want to apply this to a type with two type arguments, say

class Map[K, V]

I would like to be able to write

trait BuilderMap[K] extends Builder[Map[K, _]] {...}

but of course this does not work because type arguments in Scala are not curried.

I found that the following trick allowed me to pass compilation:

trait PartialApplier[F[_, _], K] {
    type PartiallyApplied[_] = F[K, _]
}

class BuilderMap[K] extends Builder[PartialApplier[Map, K]#PartiallyApplied] {
    def build[V] = new Map[K, V]
}

But then, some strange effect happens and I can't figure out the reason why:

scala> val m: Map[Int, String] = (new BuilderMap[Int]).build[String]
m: Map[Int,String] = Map@71da0c64

scala> val mm: (Map[Int, String], Map[Int, Double]) = (new BuilderMap[Int]).buildPair[String, Double]
<console>:21: error: type mismatch;
 found   : (Map[Int, _], Map[Int, _])
 required: (Map[Int,String], Map[Int,Double])
   val mm: (Map[Int, String], Map[Int, Double]) = (new BuilderMap[Int]).buildPair[String, Double]

It seems that the functions defined in the higher-kinded trait Builder lose some type information when I use the PartialApplier trick.

Is there a way to make all this work smoothly together? Maybe the PartialApplier trick is not the right way to go!

Kolmar Kolmar · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-01T08:54:17

In your example in type PartiallyApplied[_] = F[K, _] the underscores don't specify the same type.

It works, if you define PartialApplier as

trait PartialApplier[F[_, _], K] {
  type PartiallyApplied[V] = F[K, V]
}

Also, you may avoid using PartialApplier at all, and define Builder type parameter like this:

class BuilderMap[K] extends Builder[({ type L[V] = Map[K, V] })#L] {
  def build[V] = Map.empty[K, V]
}

Type information is lost when working with high-kinded objects in Scala

1 Answers