On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 11:40 AM, Keean Schupke <[email protected]> wrote:

> The problem us not with specialisation, its with two or more instances for
> the same type.
>
> As long as one instance is more specific I don't have a problem with them
> overlapping, I don't know if anyone else had an issue?
>
Actually, yes. There is a sleeping bear here that we need to be careful not
to poke.

Suppose you initially have two overlapping instances for something. One is
very specific, while the other is the general case. My program compiles
happily against these two instances.

Later, you update your library, adding a second specific instance. As it
happens, this is the one that I would now choose if I were compiling
against your library.

The sleeping bear is this: any change to a library that changes how
instance resolution proceeds in the importer is necessarily a change in the
library version, lest we inadvertently introduce incoherency through this
sort of change.

shap
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