Module Belt

A stdlib shipped with Melange

This stdlib is still in beta but we encourage you to try it out and give us feedback.

Motivation

The motivation for creating such library is to provide Melange users a better end-to-end user experience, since the original OCaml stdlib was not written with JS in mind. Below is a list of areas this lib aims to improve:

1. Consistency in name convention: camlCase, and arguments order
2. Exception thrown functions are all suffixed with Exn, e.g, getExn
3. Better performance and smaller code size running on JS platform

Name Convention

For higher order functions, it will be suffixed U if it takes uncurried callback.

val forEach  : 'a t -> ('a -> unit) -> unit
val forEachU : 'a t -> ('a -> unit [\@bs]) -> unit

In general, uncurried version will be faster, but it may be less familiar to people who have a background in functional programming.

A special encoding for collection safety

When we create a collection library for a custom data type we need a way to provide a comparator function. Take Set for example, suppose its element type is a pair of ints, it needs a custom compare function that takes two tuples and returns their order. The Set could not just be typed as Set.t (int * int) , its customized compare function needs to manifest itself in the signature, otherwise, if the user creates another customized compare function, the two collection could mix which would result in runtime error.

The original OCaml stdlib solved the problem using functor which creates a big closure at runtime and makes dead code elimination much harder. We use a phantom type to solve the problem:

  module Comparable1 = Belt.Id.MakeComparable(struct
    type t = int * int
    let cmp (a0, a1) (b0, b1) =
      match Pervasives.compare a0 b0 with
      | 0 -> Pervasives.compare a1 b1
      | c -> c
  end)

let mySet1 = Belt.Set.make ~id:(module Comparable1)

module Comparable2 = Belt.Id.MakeComparable(struct
  type t = int * int
  let cmp (a0, a1) (b0, b1) =
    match Pervasives.compare a0 b0 with
    | 0 -> Pervasives.compare a1 b1
    | c -> c
end)

let mySet2 = Belt.Set.make ~id:(module Comparable2)

Here, the compiler would infer mySet1 and mySet2 having different type, so e.g. a `merge` operation that tries to merge these two sets will correctly fail.

val mySet1 : ((int * int), Comparable1.identity) t
val mySet2 : ((int * int), Comparable2.identity) t

Comparable1.identity and Comparable2.identity are not the same using our encoding scheme.

Collection Hierarchy

In general, we provide a generic collection module, but also create specialized modules for commonly used data type. Take Belt.Set for example, we provide:

Belt.Set
Belt.Set.Int
Belt.Set.String

The specialized modules Belt.Set.Int, Belt.Set.String are in general more efficient.

Currently, both Belt_Set and Belt.Set are accessible to users for some technical reasons, we strongly recommend users stick to qualified import, Belt.Set, we may hide the internal, i.e, Belt_Set in the future