roc/FAQ.md

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Frequently Asked Questions

Where did the name Roc come from?

The Roc programming language is named after a mythical bird.

That’s why the logo is a bird. It’s specifically an origami bird as an homage to Elm’s tangram logo.

Roc is a direct descendant of Elm. The languages are similar, but not the same. Origami likewise has similarities to tangrams, although they are not the same. Both involve making a surprising variety of things from simple primitives. Folds are also common in functional programming.

The logo was made by tracing triangles onto a photo of a physical origami bird. It’s made of triangles because triangles are a foundational primitive in computer graphics.

The name was chosen because it makes for a three-letter file extension, it means something fantastical, and it has incredible potential for puns. Here are some different ways to spell it:

• Roc - traditional
• roc - low-key
• ROC - YELLING
• Röc - metal 🤘

Fun fact: "roc" translates to 鹏 in Chinese, which means "a large fabulous bird."

Why can't functions be compared for equality using the == operator?

Function equality has been proven to be undecidable in the general case because of the halting problem. So while we as humans might be able to look at \x -> x + 1 and \x -> 1 + x and know that they're equivalent, in the general case it's not possible for a computer to do this reliably.

There are some other potential ways to define function equality, but they all have problems.

One way would be to have two functions be considered equal if their source code is equivalent. (Perhaps disregarding comments and spaces.) This sounds reasonable, but it means that now revising a function to do exactly the same thing as before (say, changing \x -> x + 1 to \x -> 1 + x) can cause a bug in a distant part of the code base. Defining function equality this way means that revising a function's internals is no longer a safe, local operation - even if it gives all the same outputs for all the same inputs.

Another option would be to define it using "reference equality." This is what JavaScript does, for example. However, Roc does not use reference equality anywhere else in the language, and it would mean that (for example) passing \x -> x + 1 to a function compared to defining fn = \x -> x + 1 elsewhere and then passing fn into the function might give different answers.

Both of these would make revising code riskier across the entire language, which is very undesirable.

Another option would be to define that function equality always returns false. So both of these would evaluate to false:

• (\x -> x + 1) == (\x -> 1 + x)
• (\x -> x + 1) == (\x -> x + 1)

This makes function equality effectively useless, while still technically allowing it. It has some other downsides:

• Now if you put a function inside a record, using == on that record will still type-check, but it will then return false. This could lead to bugs if you didn't realize you had accidentally put a function in there - for example, because you were actually storing a different type (e.g. an opaque type) and didn't realize it had a function inside it.
• If you put a function (or a value containing a function) into a Dict or Set, you'll never be able to get it out again. This is a common problem with NaN, which is also defined not to be equal to itself.

The first of these problems could be addressed by having function equality always return true instead of false (since that way it would not affect other fields' equality checks in a record), but that design has its own problems:

• Although function equality is still useless, (\x -> x + 1) == (\x -> x) returns Bool.true. Even if it didn't lead to bugs in practice, this would certainly be surprising and confusing to beginners.
• Now if you put several different functions into a Dict or Set, only one of them will be kept; the others will be discarded or overwritten. This could cause bugs if a value stored a function internally, and then other functions relied on that internal function for correctness.

Each of these designs makes Roc a language that's some combination of more error-prone, more confusing, and more brittle to change. Disallowing function equality at compile time eliminates all of these drawbacks.

Note that you can provide a custom implementation of the Eq ability for an opaque type that contains a function, in any way you like (including ignoring the function for equality).

Why is there no way to specify "import everything this module exposes" in imports?

In Elm, it's possible to import a module in a way that brings everything that module exposes into scope. It can be convenient, but like all programming language features, it has downsides.

A minor reason Roc doesn't have this feature is that exposing everything can make it more difficult outside the editor (e.g. on a website) to tell where something comes from, especially if multiple imports are using this. ("I don't see blah defined in this module, so it must be coming from an import...but which of these several import-exposing-everything modules could it be? I'll have to check all of them, or download this code base and open it up in the editor so I can jump to definition!")

The main reason for this design, though, is compiler performance.

Currently, the name resolution step in compilation can be parallelized across modules, because it's possible to tell if there's a naming error within a module using only the contents of that module. If "expose everything" is allowed, then it's no longer clear whether anything is a naming error or not, until all the "expose everything" modules have been processed, so we know exactly which names they expose. Because that feature doesn't exist in Roc, all modules can do name resolution in parallel.

Of note, allowing this feature would only slow down modules that used it; modules that didn't use it would still be parallelizable. However, when people find out ways to speed up their builds (in any language), advice starts to circulate about how to unlock those speed boosts. If Roc had this feature, it's predictable that a commonly-accepted piece of advice would eventually circulate: "don't use this feature because it slows down your builds."

If a feature exists in a language, but the common recommendation is never to use it, that's cause for reconsidering whether the feature should be in the language at all. In the case of this feature, it's simpler if the language doesn't have it; that way nobody has to learn (or spend time spreading the word) about the performance-boosting advice not to use it.

Why doesn't Roc have a Maybe or Option or Optional type, or null or nil or undefined?

It's common for programming languages to have a null reference (e.g. null in C, nil in Ruby, None in Python, or undefined in JavaScript). The inventor of the null reference refers to it as his "billion dollar mistake" because it "has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years."

For this and other reasons, many languages do not include a null reference, but instead have a standard library data type which can be used in situations where a null reference would otherwise be used. Common names for this null reference alternative type include Maybe (like in Haskell or Elm), Option (like in OCaml or Rust), and Optional (like in Java).

By design, Roc does not have one of these. There are several reasons for this.

First, if a function returns a potential error, Roc has the convention to use Result with an error type that has a single tag describing what went wrong. (For example, List.first : List a -> Result a [ListWasEmpty] instead of List.first : List a -> Maybe a.) This is not only more self-descriptive, it also composes better with other operations that can fail; there's no need to have functions like Result.toMaybe or Maybe.toResult, because in Roc, the convention is that operations that can fail always use Result.

Second, optional record fields can be handled using Roc's Optional Record Field language feature, so using a type like Maybe there would be less ergonomic.

To describe something that's neither an optional field nor an operation that can fail, an explicit tag union can be more descriptive than something like Maybe. For example, if a record type has an artist field, but the artist information may not be available, compare these three alternative ways to represent that:

• artist : Maybe Artist
• artist : [Loading, Loaded Artist]
• artist : [Unspecified, Specified Artist]

All three versions tell us that we might not have access to an Artist. However, the Maybe version doesn't tell us why that might be. The Loading/Loaded version tells us we don't have one yet, because we're still loading it, whereas the Unspecified/Specified version tells us we don't have one and shouldn't expect to have one later if we wait, because it wasn't specified.

Naming aside, using explicit tag unions also makes it easier to transition to richer data models. For example, after using [Loading, Loaded Artist] for awhile, we might realize that there's another possible state: loading failed due to an error. If we modify this to be [Loading, Loaded Artist, Errored LoadingErr], all of our code for the Loading and Loaded states will still work.

In contrast, if we'd had Maybe Artist and were using helper functions like Maybe.isNone (a common argument for using Maybe even when it's less self-descriptive), we'd have to rewrite all the code which used those helper functions. As such, a subtle downside of these helper functions is that they discourage any change to the data model that would break their call sites, even if that change would improve the data model overall.

On a historical note, Maybe may have been thought of as a substitute for null references—as opposed to something that emerged organically based on specific motivating use cases after Result already existed. That said, in languages that do not have an equivalent of Roc's tag unions, it's much less ergonomic to write something like Result a [ListWasEmpty], so that design would not fit those languages as well as it fits Roc.

Why doesn't Roc have higher-kinded polymorphism or arbitrary-rank types?

Since this is a FAQ answer, it assumes familiarity with higher-kinded types and higher-rank types instead of including a primer on them.

A valuable aspect of Roc's type system is that it has decidable principal type inference. This means that:

• At compile time, Roc can correctly infer the types for every expression in a program, even if you don't annotate any of the types.
• This inference always infers the most general type possible; you couldn't possibly add a valid type annotation that would make the type more flexible than the one that Roc would infer if you deleted the annotation.

It's been proven that any type system which supports either higher-kinded polymorphism or arbitrary-rank types cannot have decidable principal type inference. With either of those features in the language, there will be situations where the compiler would be unable to infer a type—and you'd have to write a type annotation. This also means there would be situations where the editor would not be able to reliably tell you the type of part of your program, unlike today where it can accurately tell you the type of anything, even if you have no type annotations in your entire code base.

This is one factor that higher-rank and higher-kinded types have in common. There are other factors which are specific to each.

Higher-rank types

Supporting higher-rank types in Roc has been discussed before, but it has several important downsides:

• It would increase the complexity of the language.
• It would make some compiler error messages more confusing (e.g. they might mention forall because that was the most general type that could be inferred, even if that wasn't helpful or related to the actual problem).
• It would substantially increase the complexity of the type checker, which would necessarily slow it down.
• It would make some Roc programs run significantly more slowly. Roc compiles programs by monomorphizing, and it's unclear how we could fully monomorphize programs containing Rank-2 types. This means compiling programs which include Rank-2 types (or higher) would require sacrificing monomorphization, which would substantially degrade runtime performance.

As such, the plan is for Roc to stick with Rank-1 types indefinitely.

Higher-kinded polymorphism

The explicit plan is that Roc will never support higher-kinded polymorphism.

On the technical side, the reasons for this are ordinary: like any language feature, HKP has both benefits and drawbacks, and in the context of Roc, the drawbacks seem to outweigh the benefits. (Those who come to a different conclusion may think HKP's drawbacks would be less of a big a deal in Roc. That's reasonable; we programmers often weigh the same trade-offs differently.) To be clear, this analysis of HKP is in the specific context of Roc; there are plenty of other languages where HKP seems like a great fit. For example, it's hard to imagine Haskell without it. Similarly, lifetime annotations might be a natural fit for Rust, but they wouldn't be a good fit for Roc either.

It's also important to consider the cultural implications of deciding whether or not to support HKP. To illustrate these implications, imagine this conversation:

Programmer 1: "How do you feel about higher-kinded polymorphism?"

Programmer 2: "I have no idea what that is."

Programmer 1: "Okay, how do you feel about monads?"

Programmer 2: "OH NO."

For some, this conversation does not require imagining, because it's so familiar: higher-kinded types come up in conversation, another programmer asks what that means, monads are given as an example, and their reaction is strongly negative. On the flip side, plenty of programmers love HKP and vigorously advocate for its addition to languages they use which don't have it. Feelings about HKP seem strongly divided, maybe more so than any other type system feature besides static and dynamic types.

It's impossible for a programming language to be neutral on this. If the language doesn't support HKP, nobody can implement a Monad typeclass (or equivalent) in any way that can be expected to catch on. Advocacy to add HKP to the language will inevitably follow. If the language does support HKP, one or more alternate standard libraries built around monads will inevitably follow, along with corresponding cultural changes. (See Scala for example.) Culturally, to support HKP is to take a side, and to decline to support it is also to take a side.

Given this, languages have three options:

• Have HKP and have Monad in the standard library. Embrace them and build a culture and ecosystem around them.
• Have HKP and don't have Monad in the standard library. An alternate standard library built around monads will inevitably emerge, and both the community and ecosystem will divide themselves along pro-monad and anti-monad lines.
• Don't have HKP; build a culture and ecosystem around other things.

Considering that these are the only three options, an early decision in Roc's design—not only on a technical level, but on a cultural level as well—was to make it clear that the plan is for Roc never to support HKP. The hope is that this clarity can save a lot of community members' time that would otherwise be spent on advocacy or arguing between the two sides of the divide. Again, it's completely reasonable for anyone to have a different preference, but given that languages can only choose one of these options, it seems clear that the right choice for Roc is for it to never have higher-kinded polymorphism.

Why aren't Roc functions curried by default?

Although technically any language with first-class functions makes it possible to curry any function (e.g. anyone can manually curry a Roc function \x, y, z -> by writing \x -> \y -> \z -> instead), typically what people mean when they say Roc isn't a curried language is that Roc functions aren't curried by default. The rest of this section will use "currying" as a shorthand for "functions that are curried by default" for the sake of brevity.

Currying makes function calls more concise in some cases, but it has several significant downsides:

• It lowers error message quality, because there can no longer be an error for "function called with too few arguments." (Calling a function with fewer arguments is always valid in curried functions; the error you get instead will unavoidably be some other sort of type mismatch, and it will be up to you to figure out that the real problem was that you forgot an argument.)
• It makes the |> operator more error-prone in some cases.
• It makes higher-order function calls need more parentheses in some cases.
• It significantly increases the language's learning curve. (More on this later.)
• It facilitates pointfree function composition. (More on why this is listed as a downside later.)

There's also a downside that it would make runtime performance of compiled programs worse by default, but it would most likely be possible to optimize that away at the cost of slightly longer compile times.

These downsides seem to outweigh the one upside (conciseness in some places). Here are some more details about each of the downsides.

Currying and the |> operator

In Roc, both of these expressions evaluate to "Hello, World!"

Str.concat "Hello, " "World!"

"Hello, "
|> Str.concat "World!"

It's unsurprising to most beginners that these work the same way; it's common for a beginner who has recently learned how |> works to assume that |> Str.concat "!" would concatenate ! onto the end of a string.

This is not how it works in curried languages, however. In curried languages with a |> operator, the first expression still returns "Hello, World!" but the second one returns "World!Hello, " instead. This can be an unpleasant surprise for beginners, but even experienced users commonly find that this behavior is less useful than having both of these expressions evaluate to the same thing.

In Roc, both expressions evaluate to the same thing because Roc's |> operator uses the expression before the |> as the first argument, whereas in curried languages, |> uses it as the last argument. For example, this is how |> works in both F# and in Elm, both of which are curried languages. In contrast, Roc's |> design uses the same argument ordering as Elixir and Gleam, none of which are curried languages.

This comes up in other situations besides string concatenation. For example, consider subtraction and division:

someNumber
|> Num.div 2

someNumber
|> Num.sub 1

Again, it's reasonable to expect that |> Num.div 2 will divide a number by 2, and that |> Num.sub 1 will subtract 1 from a number. In Roc, this is how they work, but in curried languages they work the opposite way: |> Num.div 2 takes the number 2 and divides it by a number, and |> Num.sub 1 takes the number 1 and subtracts a number from it. This is once again both more surprising to beginners and less useful to experienced users.

The way |> works in Roc has a second benefit when it comes to higher-order functions. Consider these two examples:

answer = List.map numbers \num ->
    someFunction
        "some argument"
        num
        anotherArg

numbers
|> List.map Num.abs

In Roc, List.map takes a list and then a function. Because of the way |> works in Roc, numbers |> List.map Num.abs passes numbers as the first argument to List.map, and Num.abs as the second argument. So both of these examples work fine.

In a curried language, these two examples couldn't both be valid. In order for |> List.map Num.abs to work in a curried language (where |> works the other way), List.map would have to take its arguments in the opposite order: the function first and the list second.

This means the first example would have to change from this...

answer = List.map numbers \num ->
    someFunction
        "some argument"
        num
        anotherArg

...to this:

answer =
    List.map
        (\num ->
            someFunction
                "some argument"
                num
                anotherArg
        )
        numbers

The Roc version of this is nicer in that it doesn't require parentheses around the function argument. A curried language could theoretically adopt Roc's style of |> (where it pipes in the first argument instead of the last argument), but to get this second benefit, the language would also need to have List.map take the function as its second argument instead of the first. However, this would work against currying's one upside; it would no longer work to write (List.map negate) if the List.map arguments were flipped, the way they are in Roc. So currying and |> are unavoidably in tension.

As a historical note, these stylistic benefits (of |> Num.sub 1 working as expected, and being able to write List.map numbers \num ->) were not among the original reasons Roc did not have currying. These benefits were discovered after the decision had already been made that Roc would not be a curried language, and they served to reinforce after the fact that the decision was the right one for Roc given the language's goals.

Currying and learning curve

Currying leads to function signatures that look surprising to beginners. For example, in Roc, the Bool.and function has the type Bool, Bool -> Bool. If Roc were a curried language, this function would instead have the type Bool -> Bool -> Bool. Since no mainstream programming languages today are curried, anyone who knows a mainstream language and is learning their first curried language will require additional explanation about why function types look this way.

This explanation is nontrivial. It requires explaining partial application, how curried functions facilitate partial application, how function signatures accurately reflect that they're curried, and going through examples for all of these. All of it builds up to the punchline that "technically, all functions in this language have a single argument," which some percentage of learners find interesting, and some percentage still find confusing even after all that explanation.

It's common for beginners to report that currying only "clicked" for them after spending significant time writing code in a curried language. This is not the end of the world, especially because it's easy enough to think "I still don't totally get this even after that explanation, but I can remember that function arguments are separated by -> in this language and maybe I'll understand the rest later." Clearly currying doesn't preclude a language from being easy to learn, because Elm has currying, and Elm's learning curve is famously gentle.

That said, beginners who feel confused while learning the language are less likely to continue with it. And however easy Roc would be to learn if it had currying, the language is certainly easier to learn without it.

Pointfree function composition

Pointfree function composition is where you define a new function by composing together two existing functions without naming intermediate arguments. Here's an example:

reverseSort : List elem -> List elem
reverseSort = compose List.reverse List.sort

compose : (a -> b), (c -> a) -> (c -> b)
compose = \f, g, x -> f (g x)

Here's a way to write it without pointfree function composition:

reverseSort : List elem -> List elem
reverseSort = \list -> List.reverse (List.sort list)

It's common for programmers to build a mental model of what compose List.reverse List.sort does by mentally translating it into \list -> List.reverse (List.sort list). This extra mental translation step makes it take longer to read and to understand despite being technically more concise. In more complex examples (this is among the tamest of pointfree function composition examples), the chances increase of making a mistake in the mental translation step, leading to a misundesrtanding of what the function is doing—which can cause bugs.

Some languages place such a high value on conciseness that they would consider the conciceness upside to outweigh these downsides, but Roc is not one of those languages. It's considered stylistically better in Roc to write the second version above. Given this, since currying facilitates pointfree function composition, making Roc a curried language would have the downside of facilitating an antipattern in the language.

Stacking up all these downsides of currying against the one upside of making certain function calls more concise, it seems clear that Roc should not be a curried language.

Will Roc ever have linear types, dependent types, refinement types, or uniqueness types?

The plan is for Roc to never have linear types, dependent types, refinement types, or uniqueness types.

Fast compile times are a primary goal for Roc, and a major downside of refinement types is an exponential increase in compile times. This rules out refinement types for Roc.

If Roc were to have linear types or uniqueness types, they would move things that are currently behind-the-scenes performance optimizations into the type system. For them to be effective across the ecosystem, they couldn't really be opt-in; everyone would have to use them, even those for whom the current system of behind-the-scenes optimizations already met their performance needs without any added type system complexity. Since the overwhelming majority of use cases are expected to fall into that latter group, adding linear types or uniqueness types to Roc would be a net negative for the ecosystem.

Dependent types are too risky of a bet for Roc to take. They have been implemented in programming languages for three decades, and for at least half that time period, it has been easy to find predictions that dependent types will be the future of type systems. Much harder to find are success stories of complex applications built with dependent types, which realized benefits that significantly outweighed the substantial complexity of introducing value semantics to a type system.

Perhaps more success stories will emerge over time, but in the meantime it remains an open question whether dependent types are net beneficial in practice to application development. Further experimentation would be required to answer this question, and Roc is not the right language to do those experiments.

Will Roc's compiler ever be self-hosted? (That is, will it ever be written in Roc?)

The plan is to never implement Roc's compiler in Roc.

The goal is for Roc's compiler to deliver the best user experience possible. Compiler performance is strongly influenced by how memory is used, and there are many performance benefits to be gained from using a systems language like Rust which offers more direct control over memory than Roc ever should.

Roc isn't trying to be the best possible language for high-performance compiler development, but it is trying to have a high-performance compiler. The best tool for that job is a language other than Roc, so that's what we're using!

Why does Roc use the license it does?

The short explanation for why Roc is released under the Universal Permissive License:

• Like MIT, it's permissive and concise
• Like Apache2, it protects against contributors claiming software patents over contributed code after the fact (MIT and BSD do not include protections against this)
• It's compatible with GPLv2 (which Apache2 is not)
• It's one license, unlike "MIT or Apache2, at your choice" (which is how Rust addressed the problem of MIT not having patent protections but Apache2 not being GPLv2 compatible)
• It's been approved by OSI, FSF, and Oracle's lawyers, so it has been not only vetted by three giants in the world of software licensing, but also three giants with competing interests - and they all approved it.

There's also a longer explanation with more detail about the motivation and thought process, if you're interested.

Why does Roc use both Rust and Zig?

Roc's compiler has always been written in Rust. Roc's standard library was briefly written in Rust, but was soon rewritten in Zig.

There were a few reasons for this rewrite.

1. We struggled to get Rust to emit LLVM bitcode in the format we needed, which is important so that LLVM can do whole-program optimizations across the standard library and compiled application.
2. Since the standard library has to interact with raw generated machine code (or LLVM bitcode), the Rust code unavoidably needed unsafe annotations all over the place. This made one of Rust's biggest selling points inapplicable in this particular use case.
3. Given that Rust's main selling points are inapplicable (its package ecosystem being another), Zig's much faster compile times are a welcome benefit.
4. Zig has more tools for working in a memory-unsafe environment, such as reporting memory leaks in tests. These have been helpful in finding bugs that are out of scope for safe Rust.

The split of Rust for the compiler and Zig for the standard library has worked well so far, and there are no plans to change it.

Why is the website so basic?

We have a very basic website on purpose, it helps set expectations that roc is a work in progress and not ready yet for a first release.