Book Image

Learn Type-Driven Development

By : Yawar Amin, Kamon Ayeva
Book Image

Learn Type-Driven Development

By: Yawar Amin, Kamon Ayeva

Overview of this book

Type-driven development is an approach that uses a static type system to achieve results including safety and efficiency. Types are used to express relationships and other assumptions directly in the code, and these assumptions are enforced by the compiler before the code is run. Learn Type-Driven Development covers how to use these type systems to check the logical consistency of your code. This book begins with the basic idea behind type-driven development. You’ll learn about values (or terms) and how they contrast with types. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll cover how to combine types and values inside modules and build structured types out of simpler ones. You’ll then understand how to express choices or alternatives directly in the type system using variants, polymorphic variants, and generalized algebraic data types. You’ll also get to grips with sum types, build sophisticated data types from generics, and explore functions that express change in the types of values. In the concluding chapters, you’ll cover advanced techniques for code reuse, such as parametric polymorphism and subtyping. By end of this book, you will have learned how to iterate through a type-driven process of solving coding problems using static types, together with dynamic behavior, to obtain more safety and speed.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we covered how to package types and values together with modules, how to specify exactly what surface area we want to expose from our modules using signatures, and how to keep tight control over our data types using the combination of modules and signatures–even to the extent of controlling the memory allocation of data in our modules. In Reason, you'll notice this pattern a lot–you design the types to ensure that certain rules are enforced, and in a lot of situations, they will be enforced at no runtime cost.

So, stay tuned—in the next chapter, we will cover some of the most important types that we use on a daily basis in type-driven development: product types that group values together for easy access.