Monthly Archives: August 2017

2017/08/23
9 Comments
Programming

On the novelty factor of compile-time duck typing

Or structural type systems for the pendantic, but I think most people know what I mean when I say “compile-time duck typing”.

For one reason or another I’ve read quite a few blog posts about how great the Go programming language is recently. A common refrain is that Go’s interfaces are amazing because you don’t have to declare that a type has to satisfy an interface; it just does if its structure matches (hence structural typing). I’m not sold on how great this actually is – more on that later.

What I don’t understand is how this is presented as novel and never done before. I present to you a language from 1990:

template <typename T>
void fun(const T& animal) {
    cout << "It says: " << animal.say() << endl;
}

struct Dog {
    std::string say() const { return "woof"; }
};

struct Cat {
    std::string say() const { return "meow"; }
};

int main() {
    fun(Dog());
    fun(Cat());
}

Most people would recognise that as being C++. If you didn’t, well… it’s C++. I stayed away from post-C++11 on purpose (i.e. Dog{} instead of Dog()). Look ma, compile-time duck typing in the 1990s! Who’d’ve thunk it?

Is it nicer in Go? In my opinion, yes. Defining an interface and saying a function only takes objects that conform to that interface is a good thing, and a lot better than the situation in C++ (even with std::enable_if and std::void_t). But it’s easy enough to do that in D (template contraints), Haskell (typeclasses), and Rust (traits), to name the languages that do something similar that I’m more familiar with.

But in D and C++, there’s currently no way to state that your type satisfies what you need it to due to an algorithm function requiring it (such as having a member function called “say” in the silly example above) and get compiler errors telling you why it didn’t satisfy it (such as  mispelling “say” as “sey”). C++, at some point in the future, will get concepts exactly to alleviate this. In D, I wrote a library to do it. Traits and typeclasses are definitely better, but in my point of view it’s good to be able to state that a type does indeed “look like” what it needs to do to be used by certain functions. At least in D you can say static assert(isAnimal!MyType); – you just don’t know why that assertion fails when it does. I guess in C++17 one could do something similar using std::void_t. Is there an equivalent for Go? I hope a gopher enlightens me.

All in all I don’t get why this gets touted as something only Go has. It’s a similar story to “you can link statically”. I can do that in other languages as well. Even ones from the 90s.

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2017/08/15
5 Comments
Programming

The main function should be shunned

The main function (in languages that have it) is…. special. It’s the entry point of the program by convention, there can only be one of them in all the object files being linked, and you can’t run a program without it. And it’s inflexible.

Its presence means that the final output has to be an executable. It’s likely however, that the executable in question might have code that others might rather reuse than rewrite, but they won’t be able to use it in their own executables. There’s already a main function in there. Before clang nobody seemed to stumble on the idea that a compiler as a library would be a great idea. And yet…

This is why I’m now advocating for always putting the main function of an executable in its own file, all by itself. And also that it do the least amount of work possible for maximum flexibility. This way, any executable project is one excluded file away in the build system from being used as a library. This is how I’d start a, say, C++ executable project from scratch today:

#include "runtime.hpp"
#include <iostream>
#include <stdexcept>

int main(int argc, const char* argv[]) {
    try {
        run(argc, argv); // "real" main
        return 0;
    } catch(const std::exception& ex) {
        std::cout << "Oops: " << ex.what() << std::endl;
        return 1;
    }
}

In fact, I think I’ll go write an Emacs snippet for that right now.

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2017/08/08
4 Comments
Programming

API clarity with types

API design is hard. Really hard. It’s one of the reasons I like TDD – it forces you to use the API as a regular client and it usually comes out all the better for it. At a previous job we’d design APIs as C headers, review them without implementation and call it done. Not one of those didn’t have to change as soon as we tried implementing them.

The Win32 API is rife with examples of what not to do: functions with 12 parameters aren’t uncommon. Another API no-no is several parameters of the same type – which means which? This is ok:

auto p = Point(2, 3);

It’s obvious that 2 is the x coordinate and 3 is y. But:

foo("foo", "bar", "baz", "quux", true);

Sure, the actual strings passed don’t help – but what does true mean in this context? Languages like Python get around this by naming arguments at the call site, but that’s not a feature of most curly brace/semicolon languages.

I semi-recently forked and extended the D wrapper for nanomsg. The original C API copies the Berkely sockets API, for reasons I don’t quite understand. That means that a socket must be created, then bound or connect to another socket. In an OOP-ish language we’d like to just have a contructor deal with that for us. Unfortunately, there’s no way to disambiguate if we want to connect to an address or bind to it – in both cases a string is passed. My first attempt was to follow in Java’s footsteps and use static methods for creation (simplified for the blog post):

struct NanoSocket {
    static NanoSocket createBound(string uri) { /* ... */ }
    static NanoSocket createConnected(string uri) { /* ... */ }
    private this() { /* ... */ } // constructor
}

I never did feel comfortable: object creation shouldn’t look *weird*. But I think Haskell has forever changed by brain, so types to the rescue:

struct NanoSocket {
    this(ConnectTo connectTo) { /* ... */ }
    this(BindTo bindTo) { /* ... */ }
}

struct ConnectTo {
    string uri;
}

struct BindTo {
    string uri;
}

I encountered something similar when I implemented a method on NanoSocket called trySend. It takes two durations: a total time to try for, and an interval to wait to try again. Most people would write it like so:

void trySend(ubyte[] data, 
             Duration totalDuration, 
             Duration retryDuration);

At the call site clients might get confused about which order the durations are in. I think this is much better, since there’s no way to get it wrong:

void trySend(ubyte[] data, 
             TotalDuration totalDuration, 
             RetryDuration retryDuration);

struct TotalDuration {
    Duration duration;
}

struct RetryDuration {
    Duration duration;
}

What do you think?

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