This Repository holds a paper I wrote in 2022 for a Bachelor-Seminar at TUM called "Tyranny of Types". The topic I was given was called "Type Classes" and I ended up writing a comparison of Haskell's Type Classes, Rust's Traits and OCaml's Modules. A web-version of the paper with small differences can be found here.

There are many ways to abstract functionality in programming languages. One important idea of abstraction is the notion of interfaces defining functionality for abstract types. Modern languages offer different approaches to such interfaces, some focus on data abstraction, while others focus on supporting ad-hoc polymorphism. We will see the differences between parametric and ad-hoc polymorphism. Furthermore we will look at three approaches to the concept of interfaces: Haskell type classes, the type class-inspired Rust traits and OCaml's ML-inherited module system, and find them to have many similarities.

For the actual submission, I was given a page limit because of which I had to leave out some sections. The sections are currently not left out, but you will find them marked with comments in the latex source. The submission-version of the paper can be found with the "deadline-paper" git tag.

I originally started writing the paper with Markdown and mdBook and then translated it over and did further edits in latex. I then re-translated those changes back into mdBook. Thus there is a latex and a mdbook folder in this repository. Both versions are almost identical, with some small tweaks and a little more code in the mdBook version.

I also had to hold a presentation about the topic, the slides for which can be found in the presentation folder. They are written in LaTeX with beamer and use TUM's design template. There are no notes or the likes and the slides themselves aren't very useful as the actual presentation was mostly freestyle.

Later in 2024 I found out about Typst and translated this paper into it to try it out. The result can be found in the typst folder.

To build the LaTeX paper or presentation, use just:

cd latex # or presentation
just

To build the mdBook, you'll need to install mdbook-katex, then build the book:

cargo install mdbook-katex
cd mdbook
mdbook build

To build the Typst paper:

cd typst
typst compile main.typ