alt Hacker News> What folks should actually be asking is “Does my language need generics?”.
You should also ask “Does my language need subtyping such as subclasses?” And if the answer to both is yes, you should probably forget about Hindley Milner, or at least pick something far away from it on the spectrum.
Replies
derriz • today at 5:27 AM
HM handles sub-typing just fine? Numerous approaches have been known since the 1980s - Michael Wand’s row polymorphism is one such approach.
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Joker_vD • today at 4:30 AM
Eh, generics kinda do introduce a subtyping relation already. It's just that HM's Gen rule of e: σ implies e: ∀α.σ is restrictive enough that this subtyping relation can be checked (and inferred) by using just unification which is quite an amazing result.
In this case do yourself a favor and use something like simple-sub
https://github.com/LPTK/simple-sub
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/hpi54...
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3409006