> It's basically what you describe. The compiler generates generic code that can call into a variety of "codecs" but they don't have to actually be serialisation specific. So there are codecs for JSON, protobufs, CBOR etc but you can also do arbitrary object graph transformations with the framework. A deep clone being a simple hello-world type example.

So what does the value that gets passed into your codec look like? What makes Shapeless tick is that it can represent records generically at the type level; records will have a type like

    type Book = 'author ->> String :: 'title ->> String :: HNil

that you can actually break down and do meaningful operations on (e.g. you could run it through a function that counts the lengths of strings and get something of type 'author ->> Int :: 'title ->> Int :: HNil, in a fully type-safe way). I'd be impressed if someone managed to encode those kinds of types into Kotlin - e.g. I don't think Kotlin has singleton types, so being able to compare field names at the type level is probably impossible?