Return Value Wrapping
In general, the FFI code is error prone, and potentially will leak in
undefined
or null
values.
So we introduced auto coercion for return values to gain two benefits:
More safety for FFI code without performance cost (explained later).
More idiomatic OCaml code for users to consume the FFI.
Below is a contrived core example:
REtype element;
type dom;
[@bs.send] [@bs.return nullable]
external getElementById: (dom, string) => option(element) = "getElementById";
let test = dom => {
let elem = dom->(getElementById("haha"));
switch (elem) {
| None => 1
| Some(ui) =>
Js.log(ui);
2;
};
};
return nullable
attribute will automatically convert null and undefined to option
Output:
JSfunction test(dom) {
var elem = dom.getElementById("haha");
if (elem == null) {
return 1;
} else {
console.log(elem);
return 2;
}
}
Currently 4 directives are supported: null_to_opt
, undefined_to_opt
,
nullable
(introduced in @1.9.0) and identity
.
null_undefined_to_opt
works the same as nullable
,
but it is deprecated, nullable
is encouraged
null_to_opt
, undefined_to_opt
and nullable
will semantically
convert a nullable value to option
which is a boxed value, but the compiler will
do smart optimizations to remove such boxing overhead when the returned value is destructed
in the same routine.
The three directives above require users to write literally _ option
. It is
in theory not necessary, but it is required to reduce user errors.
When the return type is unit
: the compiler will append its return value
with an OCaml unit
literal to make sure it does return unit
. Its main purpose
is to make the user consume FFI in idiomatic OCaml code, the cost is very very small and
the compiler will do smart optimizations to remove it when the returned value is not used (mostly likely).
identity
will make sure that compiler will do nothing about the returned value. It
is rarely used, but introduced here for debugging purpose.