Orphan Instances

2017-06-25
reference haskell

Global type class instances

In Haskell, type class instances are global and unique. For any type, it can only have one instance of a type class and it is implicitly imported into anything that imports a file with the instance or a file that imports a file with an instance.

For example, we declare a data type Person with an instance for Show.

module A where
  
data Person =
  Person 
    { name :: String
    , age  :: Int
    }
    
instance Show Person where
  show (Person n a) = 
    "This person is named " ++ name ++ " and is " ++ (show age) ++ " years old."

In another module, we import A. This includes the type class instances that Person has implemented. We cannot create a new instance of Show Person. The compiler will complain if we try to make a new instance of Show Person.

module B where
import A

In a third module we only import B, but do not import A. Again, we cannot create a new instance of Show Person because it has been implicitly imported because B imports A.

module C where
import B

Orphan instance

Assume that A belongs to a library package called person. Now we make a new executable package called website that depends on person and we import the Person type, but we realize we forgot to add an instance of Eq so we decide to declare it in the website package.

module Website where
import A

instance Eq Person where
  (==) (Person _aName aAge) (Person _bName bAge) = aAge == bAge

This works, but the compiler will complain that we have declared an orphan instance. Orphan instances can cause problems if we declare an instance for a type in two different files and then a third file imports both of these files. That would bring in two instances of the same typeclass/type pair and that is not permissible in Haskell. We want to avoid orphan instances as much as possible.

There are two common workarounds:

  • Define all the type class instances where the type is defined. This is easy if you own the code or you are willing to maintain a branch of the library.

  • Create a newtype of the type we want more type classes for. This will avoid orphan instances, but require a lot more code and may be annoying if there are a lot of type specific functions we want to use.

Are orphan instances ever acceptable?

If you are declaring type instances in an executable package or a test package that is not shared, declaring orphan instances generally is not a problem because nothing else will import those instances and it will not contaminate other libraries.

We can silence the compiler with a simple annotation at the top any file with orphan instances.

{-# OPTIONS_GHC -fno-warn-orphans #-}

If you have any private libraries, it might be ok to declare orphan instances as well.

References