Enhancing the type system with Refined Types

Sometimes, Ints, Strings and Doubles are not enough: Int has to be greater than 0, String cannot be empty, and Double has to belong inside an interval. What if we could define these restrictions in compile-time? In this talk you will learn about Refined Types, seeing how we can enhance our type system, through the lens of ‘Refined’. Refined is a Scala library for refining types with type-level predicates which constrain the set of values described by the refined type.

Transcript

1. Enhancing the type system with Refined Types. Juliano Alves @vonjuliano juliano-alves.com
2. Who am I? • Software Engineer, Searcher of perfect modularization, Lover of Functional Languages • The cool ones Scala, Clojure, Elixir • The "vintage" ones Java, C#, Python, Ruby @vonjuliano juliano-alves.com
3. https://getquill.io
6. Once upon a time...
11. https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
15. Tiny Types.
18. (Actually, from ML-family languages)
20. Expressiveness, which is strongly related to code maintainability.
23. Does it solve the problem? • Java-ish solution • Options everywhere • Boilerplate validation code
24. Refinement types.
25. A refinement type is a type endowed with a predicate which is assumed to hold for any element of the refined type. … Refinement types are thus related to behavioral subtyping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refinement_type
27. refinement type = base type + predicate
28. https://github.com/fthomas/refined
30. base type + predicate
34. Macros explained: THE DARK PLAYGROUND
37. Domain reduction.
38. It makes the compiler work for us.
39. Easier testing, many tests become irrelevant.
40. Provided Predicates.
41. Provided Predicates • Boolean (True, False, And, Or) • Char (Letter, Uppercase, Whitespace) • Collection (Contains, Forall, MinSize) • Numeric (Less, Greater, Positive, Interval) • String (Regex, Url, Uuid) • And many more: https://github.com/fthomas/refined
42. Using Predicates.
43. Combining predicates: Github Handle
45. How is that useful in the real world?
46. RefinedTypeOps
47. Drawbacks.
48. Compile time.
49. Validation error messages could be better.
50. Summary
51. Why Refined? The compiler does the job Typesafety Uniform (with Either) Validation Improves maintainability Expressiveness More precise definition, less tests Easier testing
52. Thank you! @vonjuliano juliano-alves.com/