Is there a Template Haskell / deriving mechanism for Data.Binary (or friends?)

Question

The Data.Binary documentation shows writing an instance by hand. Is there a way around this? I saw here there is another library, SerTH, which has a (Template Haskell based) deriving mechanism, but the link to it seems broken. Also, if you know other libraries, good performance is critical for us.

Thank you in advance!

GHC 7.2 supports this natively using default deriving... I wrote the code for it awhile back and it was pretty simple — alternative, Jan 03 '12 at 17:04

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered May 02 '13 at 00:14

See http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/binary/0.7.1.0/doc/html/Data-Binary.html#g:3

 {-# LANGUAGE DeriveGeneric #-}

 import Data.Binary
 import GHC.Generics (Generic)

 data Foo = Foo
          deriving (Generic)

 -- GHC will automatically fill out the instance
 instance Binary Foo

aleator · Answer 2 · 2012-01-03T16:47:54.917

5

Neil Mitchells Derive package has a template haskell macro for deriving binary instances.

edited Jan 03 '12 at 16:47

answered Jan 03 '12 at 16:05

aleator

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score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 03 '12 at 18:10

Since you asked about other libraries:

The cereal data serialisation library has cereal-derive, which works with the new Generics support in GHC 7.2. This has a compile-time speed advantage over Template Haskell (I tend to avoid TH these days just because it makes compilation even slower) and a run-time speed advantage over datatype-generic methods like SYB and Uniplate.

cereal is very similar to binary, but uses strict ByteStrings; binary hasn't been updated since 2009 and cereal has niceties such as IEEE-754 float format support, so I can't see any reason not to use it over binary if you want deriving.

cereal-derive is GPL3. This might be an issue for some use-cases. — user239558, Mar 29 '12 at 09:11

Is there a Template Haskell / deriving mechanism for Data.Binary (or friends?)

3 Answers3