A coworker of mine and I frequently talk about higher kinded types, category theory, and lament about the lack of unified types in scala: namely functors. A functor is a fancy name for a thing that can be mapped on. Wanting to abstract over something that is mappable comes up more often than you think. I don’t necessarily care that its an Option, or a List, or a whatever. I just care that it has a map.

We’re not the only ones who want this. Cats, Shapeless, Scalaz, all have implementations of functor. The downside there is that usually these definitions tend to leak throughout your ecosystem. I’ve written before about ecosystem and library management, and it’s an important thing to think about when working at a company of 50+ people. You need to think long and hard about putting dependencies on things. Sometimes you can, if those libraries have good versioning or back-compat stories, or if they expose lightweight API’s with heavyweight bindings that you can separate out.

Often times these libraries aren’t really well suited for large scale use and so you’re forced to either replicate, denormalize, or otherwise hide away how those things come into play.

In either case, this post isn’t about that. I just wanted to know how the hell those libraries did the magic.

Let me lay out the final product first and we’ll break it down:

  
trait Functor[F[\_]] {  
 def map[A, B](f: F[A])(m: A =\> B): F[B]  
}

object Functor {  
 implicit class FunctorOps[F[\_], A](f: F[A])(implicit functor: Functor[F]) {  
 def map[B](m: A =\> B): F[B] = {  
 functor.map(f)(m)  
 }  
 }

implicit def iterableFunctor[T[X] \<: Traversable[X]] = new Functor[T] {  
 override def map[A, B](f: T[A])(m: A =\> B) = {  
 f.map(m).asInstanceOf[T[B]]  
 }  
 }

implicit def optionFunctor = new Functor[Option] {  
 override def map[A, B](f: Option[A])(m: A =\> B) = {  
 f.map(m)  
 }  
 }

implicit def futureFunctor(implicit executionContext: ExecutionContext) = new Functor[Future] {  
 override def map[A, B](f: Future[A])(m: A =\> B) = {  
 f.map(m)  
 }  
 }  
}

And no code is complete without a test…

  
class Tests extends FlatSpec with Matchers {

import com.curalate.typelevel.Functor  
 import com.curalate.typelevel.Functor.\_

private def testMaps[T[\_] : Functor](functor: T[Int]): T[Int] = {  
 functor.map(x =\> x + 1)  
 }

"A test" should "run" in {  
 testMaps(List(1)) shouldEqual List(2)

testMaps(Some(1): Option[Int]) shouldEqual Some(2)

testMaps(None: Option[Int]) shouldEqual None

testMaps(Set(1)) shouldEqual Set(2)

Await.result(testMaps(Future.successful(1)), Duration.Inf) shouldEqual 2  
 }  
}

How did we get here? First if you look at the definition of functor again

  
trait Functor[F[\_]] {  
 def map[A, B](f: F[A])(m: A =\> B): F[B]  
}

We’re saying that

  1. Given a type F that contains some other unknown type (i.e. F is a box, like List, or Set)
  2. Define a map function from A to B and give me back a type of F of B

The nuanced part here is that the map takes an instance of F[A]. We need this to get all the types to be happy, since we have to specify somewhere that F[A] and A => B are paired together.

Lets make a functor for list, since that one is pretty easy:

  
object Functor {  
 implicit lazy val listFunctor = new Functor[List] {  
 override def map[A, B](f: List[A])(m: A =\> B) = {  
 f.map(m)  
 }  
 }  
}

Now we can get an instance of functor from a List[T]

We could use it like this now:

  
def listMapper(f: Functor[List[Int]])(l: List[Int]) = {  
 f.map(l)(\_ + 1)  
}

But that sort of sucks. I don’t want to know I have a list, that defeats the purpose of a functor!

What if we do

  
def intMapper[T[\_]](f: Functor[T[Int]])(l: T[Int]) = {  
 f.map(l)(\_ + 1)  
}

Kind of better. Now I have a higher kinded type that doesn’t care about what the box is. But I still need to somehow get an instance of a functor to do my mapping.

This is where the ops class come in:

  
implicit class FunctorOps[F[\_], A](f: F[A])(implicit functor: Functor[F]) {  
 def map[B](m: A =\> B): F[B] = {  
 functor.map(f)(m)  
 }  
}

This guy says given a container, and a functor for that container, here is a helpful map function. It’s giving us an extension method on F[A] that adds map. You may wonder, well dont’ all things we’re mapping on already have a map function? And the answer is yes, but the compiler doesn’t know that since we’re dealing with only generics here!

Now, we can import our functor ops class and finally get that last bit to work:

  
class Tests extends FlatSpec with Matchers {

import com.curalate.typelevel.Functor  
 import com.curalate.typelevel.Functor.\_

private def testMaps[T[\_] : Functor](functor: T[Int]): T[Int] = {  
 functor.map(x =\> x + 1)  
 }

"A test" should "run" in {  
 testMaps(List(1)) shouldEqual List(2)

testMaps(Some(1): Option[Int]) shouldEqual Some(2)

testMaps(None: Option[Int]) shouldEqual None

testMaps(Set(1)) shouldEqual Set(2)

Await.result(testMaps(Future.successful(1)), Duration.Inf) shouldEqual 2  
 }  
}

Pulling it all together, we’re asking for a type of T that is a box of anything that has an implicit Functor[T] typeclass. We want to use the map method on the functor of T and that map method comes because we leverage the implicit FunctionOps.

It helps to think of functor not as an interface that a thing implements, but as a typeclass/extension of a thing. I.e. in order to get a map, you have to wrap something.

Anyways, big thanks to Christian for helping me out.