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Tablecloth

CircleCI

Tablecloth is a set of libraries for different functional languages, which each have the same function names, making it easier to move between languages.

There are currently implementations for:

  • Rescript
  • OCaml
  • F#
  • Elm - the API is extremely similar to the Elm standard library

Each implementation:

  • supports the same function and module names
    • names are adapted for camelCase or snake_case, as appropriate
  • is idiomatic to the language it's in
    • uses standard types
    • follows language best practices (eg the OCaml version uses labels, but the Rescript version does not)
    • uses standard tooling and packaging
  • is licensed in the normal way
  • has a code of conduct
  • has friendly maintainers

Tablecloth is alpha-quality software, and is pre-1.0. Some of the changes listed above are still in progress. Caveat emptor.

Check out the website for our interactive API documentation, or join the community in the Tablecloth Discord.

Design goals

When switching between functional languages, it can be frustrating to try to remember the names of different functions, which are not standardized and differ due to history.

At the same time, we recognize that each language has their own idioms, and often have mature and optimized standard libraries that we do not wish to replace. As such, each version of tablecloth is simple a set of functions which call existing standard libraries, and uses idiomatic patterns for the language in question.

Tablecloth was originally written to help port the Darklang frontend from Elm to ReasonML. As we used OCaml on the backend, we tried to reuse some libraries by adding OCaml versions of the ReasonML functions. However, code reuse was difficult and never took off, and we ended up splitting the two libraries when the ReasonML community moved to Rescript, which did not have the goal to be compatible with OCaml. When we ported the backend from OCaml to F#, we added an F# version. At this point we realized the real value was not in having portable code, but rather in having the same function names everywhere.

Contributions

The maintainers are warm and friendly, and the project abides by a Code of Conduct.

Check out the dedicated guide on contributing for more.

License

Tablecloth uses the MIT license. Implementations of Tablecloth should use the standard licenses used by libraries in their language's ecosystem.

Authors

Initially written by Darklang.