Programming Extensible Data Types in Rust with CGP - Part 1: Highlights and Extensible Records Demo

[soareschen]

Hi everyone, I’m excited to share the latest progress in Context-Generic Programming (CGP), which now includes support for extensible records and variants in Rust.

Read the blog post here: https://contextgeneric.dev/blog/extensible-datatypes-part-1/

If you're new to the concept, extensible data types allow us to read from, construct, and extract data from a generic struct or enum without needing to know its concrete type definition. This opens the door to powerful design patterns, such as building generic builders or visitors that can operate flexibly over a wide range of data structures.

In the first post of this new blog series, I walk through a simple example that shows how to use extensible builders to construct an application context in a modular way. I’d love to hear what you think — especially whether the approach feels practical or insightful for your own work. I’ll be sharing more updates over the next few days, so stay tuned!