jordwalke / bread

Data Structures and Algorithms designed for Reason 🍞🥖🥐

Bread 🍞🥖🥐

bread - / brɛd / - n.

1. A critical element in sandwich construction that provides structure.
2. Container for items such as bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

Bread drastically increases the efficiency sandwiches can be created and used. Its effect is similar to that of data structures and algorithms on an application.

Principles

Like all good loaves of bread, the primary focus of this repo is on documentation and usability. This is accomplished with an extra layer of indirection. The library itself is not implemented in plain source code; instead, it is generated from a "schema" that contains configuration information about implementation, documentation, and other metadata. This makes writing the implementations more painful, but gives us many nice things:

• Docs are way better, can be enforced, and easily updated.
  • Relationships between functions can be defined in metadata and easily included in all doc-blocks.
  • Module and function names can be verified.
  • Data structures that "inherit" functions can use the concrete module name in docs instead of them being generalized.
  • Can have multiple output formats odoc, markdown, html.
  • And many more!
• Common functions can be inlined.
  • It's normal to use some convenient helpers like Option.flatMap when implementing data structures. Using these helpers causes unnecessary function calls compared to using a switch directly, but the latter can be very annoying to write every time. We can avoid the annoyance with our fancy code generation and get faster code!
• Project structure can be changed easily.
  • Don't want some fancy data structures that are big and bloated? No problem! We just won't generate that part of the library and its dependencies for you.
  • We can put everything in one big file for you! If you want that I guess.
• Functions with "variable args" can all have nice docs.
  • All those map2, map3, mapX like functions can be generated. (We have the technology!) We will be able to avoid map2 having docs like: "This is the same as map with more args", and be able to repeat the proper documentation block each time.
• Infix operators can be changed to match your preferences.
• There are probably other cool things we can do. Let us know if you have ideas!

Documentation

We don't have docs yet. Hah, take that person exploring this library.

(Ironic isn't it?)

Development

Primary commands

• esy - Builds and installs
• esy format - Runs refmt on all source code
• esy test - Runs Rely tests
• esy gen - Generates lib/bread source code for use

Directory setup

• src/bread_config
  • This is the source code and configuration that will be used to build lib/bread. This is a level of indirection that allows outputting more performant, consistent, and better documented code.
• src/bread_gen
  • An executable that reads source code and configuration information from src/bread_config and creates lib/bread.
• lib/bread
  • The final output that can be consumed.
  • Everything in here is generated and should not be modified manually.
• tests/TestExe.re
  • This is the test executable. Any reason files in tests that open TestFramework and use describe will be registered and run when calling esy test.
  • See reason-native/rely.