As the author of an open-source serialization library in Scala, I've undergone a lot of struggle to understand and harness the power of Scala's type system. My library was based on parsing pickled Scala signatures, which was a subterranean and sparely documented feature of Scala 2.8. I wanted to serialize and deserialize options, lists and maps, which required defeating type erasure when serializing while skating by on type erasure when deserializing. I struggled with multiple constructors, checking for annotation types, specialization, more. The new reflection libraries introduced in Scala 2.10 provided easier access to the same information I had been getting from the pickled signatures. This talk will address practical aspects of type mining, providing a library of hands-on examples using the Scala 2.10 reflection API.

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