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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

> "newtypes can provide a sort of safety, just a weaker one. The primary safety benefit of newtypes is derived from abstraction boundaries. If a newtype’s constructor is not exported, it becomes opaque to other modules. The module that defines the newtype—its “home module”—can take advantage of this to create a trust boundary where internal invariants are enforced by restricting clients to a safe API."

The author appears to be claiming that this is somehow distinct from (and qualitatively weaker than) "type safety", without any justification for that claim.

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The justification from the article:

"To some readers, these pitfalls may seem obvious, but safety holes of this sort are remarkably common in practice. ... Proper use of this technique demands caution and care:

* All invariants must be made clear to maintainers of the trusted module...

* Every change to the trusted module must be carefully audited to ensure it does not somehow weaken the desired invariants.

* Discipline is needed to resist the temptation to add unsafe trapdoors that allow compromising the invariants if used incorrectly.

* Periodic refactoring may be needed to ensure the trusted surface area remains small...

In contrast, datatypes that are correct by construction suffer none of these problems."

The article lists a few specific pitfalls. I don't think this justifies the claim that "it is a meaningfully distinct kind of type safety": newtype-based approaches may have further pitfalls that ground-up construction approaches do not, but ground-up construction approaches do still have pitfalls.

To get more specific:

* Safety holes of this sort are remarkably uncommon in practice, in my experience.

* Modules should be small and easily understood. If maintaining a module's invariants becomes too complex then you can, and should, recursively apply the same techniques within the module, breaking it up into smaller modules. This is good development practice anyway, as is periodic refactoring. So these cautions are a lot less costly than they sound; in fact the cost may well be zero.

* You need to resist the temptation to add unsafe trapdoors in any other approach as well; this simply isn't a disadvantage that's in any way specific to using newtypes.

> * You need to resist the temptation to add unsafe trapdoors in any other approach as well; this simply isn't a disadvantage that's in any way specific to using newtypes.

In fact, in some cases, it's useful to retain (redundant or invalid) state that's discarded in "correct by construction" data structures. For example, saving application configuration as Option<int> is easier for the application to read correctly (int value, bool present). However when a user is editing an Option<T> through a GUI (checkbox, number) pair, then unchecking the checkbox will set the value to None and discard the last entered value, which is a poor user experience in my view.

This isn’t necessarily so, though. I don’t see why unchecking the checkbox can’t create an Option<T> that is passed (int value, bool false). It just means that you accept this as a valid construction state, and that it must therefore be handled.

I admit that I might be missing something fundamental to this discussion.

I meant to say "saving application configuration as Option<int> (either int value or None) is easier for the application to read correctly then a tuple (int value, bool present)."

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