Tablecloth

Tablecloth is an ergonomic, cross-platform, standard library for use with OCaml and Rescript. It provides an easy-to-use, comprehensive and performant standard library, that has the same API on all OCaml/Rescript platforms.

Tablecloth is alpha-quality software, and is pre-1.0. The API will change in the next version as we change the goals of the project a little bit. Caveat emptor.

Check out the website for our interactive API documentation.

See the CHANGELOG for list of changes in each release.

Installation

Rescript

Install via npm by:

npm install tablecloth-rescript

Then add to your bsconfig.json file:

"bs-dependencies" : ["tablecloth-rescript"]

OCaml native

Install via opam:

opam install tablecloth-native

Then add to your dune file:

(libraries (tablecloth-native ...))

Usage

The recommended way to use Tablecloth is with a top-level open at the beginning of a file.

This will ensure that all the built-in modules are replaced.

open Tablecloth

let () =
  String.toList "somestring"
  |> List.map ~f:Char.toCode
  |> List.map ~f:(fun x -> x+1)
  |> List.filterMap ~f:Char.fromCode
  |> String.fromList

Supported versions

Rescript

Tablecloth supports Rescript 9. Older versions of Tablecloth supported older versions of bs-platform.

Native

Tablecloth for native OCaml supports OCaml 4.08-4.10 and Base v0.12.2/v0.13.2. We are open to supporting other versions:

• OCaml 4.11 is believed to work but is not officially supported as there is no docker container for it in CI.
• OCaml 4.06 and 4.07 require small tweaks to our build system
• Base v0.9, v0.10, and v0.11 require small code changes
• Base v0.14 require small dependency tweaks

Development

When developing Tablecloth, you can test it against different versions of rescript, OCaml (native) and Base, using the following commands:

• TC_RESCRIPT_VERSION=7.1.1 make deps-rescript
• TC_BASE_VERSION=v0.14.0 TC_NATIVE_OCAML_SWITCH=4.11.0 make deps-native

Design of Tablecloth

Dark uses multiple versions of OCaml on the frontend and backend:

• Our backend is written in OCaml native, using Jane Street Core as a standard library
• Our frontend is written in Rescript
• Parts of our backend are shared with the frontend by compiling them using js_of_ocaml, and running them in a web worker.

We discovered that it was impossible to share code between the Rescript frontend and the native OCaml backend, as the types and standard libraries were very different:

• Rescript uses camelCase by default, while most native libraries, including Core and the OCaml standard library, use snake_case.
• The libraries in Belt have different names and function signatures than native OCaml and Base/Core.
• Many OCaml libraries have APIs optimized for pipelast (|>), while Belt aims for pipefirst (|.).
• Core does not work with Rescript, while Belt is optimized for the JS platform.
• Belt does not work in native OCaml, while Core is optimized for the native OCaml runtime.
• Belt is incomplete relative to Core, or to other languages' standard libraries

Tablecloth's solution

Tablecloth solves this by providing an identical API for Rescript and OCaml. It wraps existing standard libraries on those platforms, and so is fast and memory efficient. It is draws inspiration from Elm's standard library, which is extremely well-designed and ergonomic.

Tablecloth provides separate libraries for OCaml native/js_of_ocaml and Rescript . The libraries have the same API, but different implementations, and are installed as different packages.

The APIs:

• have both snake_case and camelCase versions of all functions and types
• are backed by Jane Street Base for native OCaml
• are backed by Belt and the Js library for Rescript
• use labelled arguments so that can be used with both pipefirst (->) and pipelast (|>)
• are well documented, and reasonably-well tested

We also have design goals that are not yet achieved in the current version:

• Many of the functions could be much more efficient
• Tablecloth functions should not throw any exceptions
• All functions should have well-known and consistent edge-case behaviour

Contributing

Tablecloth is an ideal library to contribute to, even if you're new to OCaml or Rescript.

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

There are many small tasks to be done - a small change to a single function can be extremely helpful.

Check out the dedicated guide on contributing for more.

Developing

If you are new to OCaml there are a few prerequisites you will need to get started:

• Install OCaml and OPAM based on your OS
• You may need to run opam init
• For Rescript install a current version of Node

Please refer to the Makefile for a complete list of supported actions. Here is a handful of useful, supported commands:

• make deps-native: Install OCaml dependencies.
• make deps-rescript: Install Rescript dependencies.
• make build: Build the project.
• make test: Run the test suite. You may need to make build first.
• make check-format: Check your code is formatted correctly.
• make format: Format code.
• cd ocamldoc-json-generator && make deps && make doc: Build model.json for the website (needs to be updated and checked in whenever the APIs change.)

License

Tablecloth uses the MIT license. Some functions are based on Elm/core (BSD), and from the *.Extra packages in elm-community, which use a BSD license.

Authors

Written with the help of Dark.