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Mutually Recursive Modules in OCaml
16 Nov 2017
In Chapter 10 of Purely Functional Data Structures, Okasaki describes a technique called data structure bootstrapping. It’s a way to reuse existing implementation of data structures to construct (bootstrap) new ones.
In one of the examples he creates a new heap implementation with an efficient merge operation using another heap as basis, but it turns out that to implement this, we need to rely on mutually recursive modules, that is, two modules A and B, where A depends on B, and B depends on A.
In this post we’ll study the bootstrapped heap and learn how to implement mutually recursive modules in OCaml.
Heap with efficient merging
Assume we have a heap implementation with O(1) insert, and O(log n) merge, findMin and deleteMin operations. We’ve seen such an implementation with Skewed Binomial Heaps
We’ll see how to construct a new heap implementation which will improve the merge complexity to O(1).
Let’s call the base heap PrimaryHeap and define our heap type as
type 'a heap = Empty | Heap of 'a * ('a heap) PrimaryHeap.heapthis type can be either empty or a node with an element (root) and a primary heap whose element is the bootstrapped heap itself, that is, heap and PrimaryHeap.heap form a mutually recursive types. Note that the above is not a valid OCaml code. We’re using it to explain the theoretical concepts.
We can think of this as a k-ary tree where the element is the root and the children of that node are the subtrees, but these subtrees are stored in a heap instead of an array.
The root element at each node is the smallest among all of the subtrees. Hence, to obtain the minimum element for a heap, findMin, is trivial: we can simply return that element:
let findMin (heap: heap): tv =
match heap with
| Empty -> raise Empty_heap
| Heap(elem, _) -> elemMerging two bootstrapped heaps is analogous to linking two trees. The only invariant we need to maintain is that the smallest root continues being the root.
let merge (heap1: heap) (heap2: heap) = match (heap1, heap2) with
| (Empty, heap2) -> heap2
| (heap1, Empty) -> heap1
| (Heap (element1, primaryHeap1), Heap (element2, primaryHeap2)) ->
if ((Element.compare element1 element2) < 0)
then Heap(element1, PrimaryHeap.insert heap2 primaryHeap1)
else Heap(element2, PrimaryHeap.insert heap1 primaryHeap2)Since the primary heap has O(1) insert, the bootstrapped heap has O(1) merge, which was our goal. Note that we can implement insert using merge by creating a singleton node and merging it with an existing heap.
let singleton (elem: tv): heap = Heap(elem, PrimaryHeap.empty)
let insert (elem: tv) (heap: heap): heap =
merge heap (singleton elem)We need to handle the deletion of the minimum element, which is the more involved operation. It consists in discarding the root of the present node, and finding a new root from the primary heap.
Since each element in the primary heap is a bootstrapped heap, we first obtain the bootstrapped heap containing the smallest element:
(Heap (newMinElem, minPrimaryHeap)) =
PrimaryHeap.findMin primaryHeapthen we remove this node from the primaryHeap, and we merge the minPrimaryHeap back into primaryHeap.
let restPrimaryHeap = PrimaryHeap.deleteMin primaryHeap
in PrimaryHeap.merge minPrimaryHeap restPrimaryHeapfinally we make newMinElem the new root element of our top level bootstrapped heap. The complete code is
let deleteMin (heap: heap) =
match heap with
| Empty -> raise Empty_heap
| Heap(_, primaryHeap) ->
if PrimaryHeap.isEmpty primaryHeap then Empty
else
let (Heap (newMinElem, minPrimaryHeap)) =
PrimaryHeap.findMin primaryHeap
in let restPrimaryHeap = PrimaryHeap.deleteMin primaryHeap
in Heap (newMinElem, PrimaryHeap.merge minPrimaryHeap restPrimaryHeap)The only missing part is defining the correct type of the bootstrapped heap.
Mutually Recursive Modules
Okasaki mentions that recursive structures are not supported in Standard ML (at least at the time my copy of the book was printed), but they are supported in OCaml.
To make modules mutually depend on another, we need to mark it as recursive via the rec keyword, and declaring both modules at the same time by using the and connector. Let’s work with a toy example: two modules Even and Odd, where each depend on the other.
module rec Even = struct
type t = Zero | Succ of Odd.t
end
and Odd = struct
type t = Succ of Even.t
endThis will lead to a compilation error:
Error: Recursive modules require an explicit module type.
We need to write the signatures explicitly:
module rec Even : sig
type t = Zero | Succ of Odd.t
end = struct
type t = Zero | Succ of Odd.t
end
and Odd : sig
type t = Succ of Even.t
end = struct
type t = Succ of Even.t
endThis blog post from Jane Street describes a way to define mutually recursive modules by only listing its signatures:
module rec Even: sig
type t = Succ of Odd.t
end = Even
and Odd: sig
type t = Succ of Even.t
end = OddThe OCaml compiler can infer the implementation part from the type definitions, but unfortunately this won’t work if the module has function definitions, which is the case for our heap implementation.
Things get more complicated in our case because the primary heap implementation uses a functor to generate a heap taking the element’s module as parameter. In this case the element’s module is our bootstrapped heap. A valid module definition is given below:
module rec BootstrappedElement: sig
type t = Empty | Heap of Element.t * PrimaryHeap.heap
val compare: t -> t -> int
end = struct
type t = Empty | Heap of Element.t * PrimaryHeap.heap
let compare heap1 heap2 = match (heap1, heap2) with
| (Heap (x, _), Heap (y, _)) -> Element.compare x y
end
and PrimaryHeap: IHeapWithMerge
with type tv := BootstrappedElement.t = SkewBinomialHeap(BootstrappedElement);;Let’s understand what is going on.
type t = Empty | Heap of Element.t * PrimaryHeap.heap
is the definition we presented above. We also implement the methods from the Set.OrderedType interface, namely compare, since this is the interface the heap maker expects. The comparison is based solely on the root element.
Then we declare the PrimaryHeap type at the same time, with type IHeapWithMerge, and because tv is unbound in that interface, we need to bind it to BootstrappedElement.t:
PrimaryHeap: IHeapWithMerge with type tv := BootstrappedElement.t
Finally we provide the implementation, using the result of the SkewBinomialHeap() functor having the BootstrappedElement module as element type:
PrimaryHeap (...) = SkewBinomialHeap(BootstrappedElement)
The syntax is pretty involved, but it accomplishes what we wanted. We can further refine this definition by adding
include Set.OrderedType with type t := t
to the BootstrappedElement signature. This includes all the interface of Set.OrderedType.
These newly defined modules are defined within a functor, the BootstrappedHeap, together with the methods we defined above. Like other heap generators, the functor takes a module representing the element type as parameter. In this case we can also allow the primary heap type to be passed as parameter so we don’t have to use SkewBinomialHeap as implementation. Any heap with merge will do.
module BootstrappedHeap
(Element: Set.OrderedType)
(MakeHeap: functor (Element: Set.OrderedType) -> IHeapWithMerge with type tv = Element.t)
: IHeap with type tv = Element.t =
struct
module rec BootstrappedElement: sig
type t = Empty | Heap of Element.t * PrimaryHeap.heap
include Set.OrderedType with type t := t
end = struct
type t = Empty | Heap of Element.t * PrimaryHeap.heap
let compare heap1 heap2 = match (heap1, heap2) with
| (Heap (x, _), Heap (y, _)) -> Element.compare x y
end
and PrimaryHeap: IHeapWithMerge
with type tv := BootstrappedElement.t = MakeHeap(BootstrappedElement);;
(* Methods definition below... *)
endThe constructors define within BootstrappedElement are visible within BootstrappedHeap but they need qualification, such as BootstrappedElement.Heap. To avoid repeating this qualifier, we can use:
include BootstrappedElement
The complete implementation for BootstrappedHeap can be found on github.
Conclusion
The idea of using implementations of a given data structure to yield improve implementations is amazing! The mutual recursion nature of the bootstrap heap got me at first, but making analogies with a k-ary tree made it easier to understand.
I was struggling a lot to get the syntax right for the recursive modules required for this implementation until I stumbled upon this github repository, from which I learned many new things about OCaml.
