On Naming Things: Library Design

Perhaps you’ve heard this joke:

There are only two hard problems in computer science: Naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors

Lol.

Naming things ends up being actually pretty difficult! It’s a nontrivial problem in library design, and there are interesting constraints imposed by the technologies we use. There are a number of best practices and guidelines available for using libraries that make code easier to read and understand. But we don’t have compelling guidelines available for actually writing these libraries.

I’ve written a few libraries now and have tried out different naming and exporting conventions. I’ve developed a bit of a feel for how it is to write and use them, and I’m going to put out my personal preferences and opinions on library design here. This post will be discussing the Haskell programming language and ecosystem.

Usage best practices

So you’ve got a bare Haskell module:

module Main where main :: IO () main = do ...

The module $NAME where starts the module definition, followed by a list of imports, and then declarations. There are no imports declared. So you know that all terms are coming from the Prelude module. If you’ve enabled NoImplicitPrelude language extension, then you won’t even have that in scope!

As we add imports, we add new terms. Each new term might be unfamiliar to a programmer who is unfamiliar with the import. As you add more and more imports, it’s important (sorry) to make it easy for people to find where that term comes from.

Consider this import list:

import Data.Aeson import Data.Aeson.TH import qualified Data.Map.Strict as Map import Data.Swagger import Database.Esqueleto import Database.Esqueleto.Internal.Language ( Update ) import Servant

If a new person comes upon a term that they don’t understand, where did it come from? It could be any of those imports. There are typically two proposed solutions: explicit import lists, and qualified imports.

Qualified Imports

import qualified Data.Aeson as Aeson import qualified Data.Aeson.TH as Aeson import qualified Data.Map.Strict as Map import qualified Data.Swagger as Swagger import qualified Database.Esqueleto as Esqueleto import qualified Database.Esqueleto.Internal.Language ( Update ) import qualified Servant

Unfortunately, this leads to extremely verbose code, and also makes operators super annoying to use. Consider this example usage:

type Api = "hello" Servant .:> Servant . Get '[ S ervant . JSON ] Hello data Hello = Hello { helloMap :: Map . Map String Int } Aeson . deriveJSON Aeson . defaultJSONOptions '' H ello -- or, instance Aeson . ToJSON Hello where toJSON hello = Aeson . object [ "map" Aeson ..= Aeson . toJSON ( helloMap hello ) ]

Gross! This makes the code way noisier, and more verbose. Everyone pays a significant cost when writing and reading this code. Only new people to the codebase are benefitted, and even then, only for a short time.

It’s common for the module name to be shortened, so Data.ByteString becomes BS or B , and Data.HashMap.Strict becomes M . Sometimes you’ll have Data.Text , Data.Text.Encoding , and Data.Text.IO all qualified under T or Text , which make it less easy to figure out where the term is coming from.

Qualified imports are great sometimes, but they don’t seem to be a great solution all of the time. So typically people use another strategy for making the namespace clean:

Explicit Import Lists

You can also list out all of the terms that you use explicitly after the import. This is a good practice, because it doesn’t make the code more verbose, it just makes the import lists bigger.

Here’s the previous code snippet and import list, but with explicit imports:

import Servant (( :> ), Get , JSON ) import Map ( Map ) import Data.Aeson ( ToJSON ( .. ), object , ( .= )) type Api = "hello" :> Get '[ J SON ] Hello data Hello = Hello { helloMap :: Map String Int } deriveJSON defaultJSONOptions '' H ello -- or, instance ToJSON Hello where toJSON hello = object [ "map" .= toJSON ( helloMap hello ) ]

This looks a lot cleaner. Anyone that wants to know where a term comes from can simply search for it in the import lists. However, it requires developer discipline or tooling to keep the import lists up to date. If you update the API type to include the Post type, then you’ll get a compile failure to update the import list. This can be somewhat frustrating to work with.

There’s another approach that some libraries use:

Just stick me in my own module!

Some libraries, like Parsec, Esqueleto, etc. want to be used in their own module. In my projects at work, I typically will have a module structure like:

module App.SomeType where -- type definition, functions for operating on the type, etc module App.SomeType.Parser where import Data.Attoparsec.ByteString -- the parser definition

Why? The exports of Attoparsec and the encouraged style of writing functions have a tendency to collide with the names and functions for actually using the types. These aren’t typically imported or cared about: most clients of a Parser module just want parseThing :: ByteString -> Either Error Thing , not thing :: Parser Thing or someSubComponentOfThing :: Parser Whatever .

Likewise, the SQL library Esqueleto builds upon the Persistent database library for writing more advanced queries. It redefines some of the terms and operators so that the language looks consistent with the Persistent DSL for queries and updates, but these are name collisions. Additionally, the eDSL defines a bunch of common names like on , from , and select , which easily collide with other modules. So I’ll typically have a module structure like:

module App.Models.SomeModel where import Database.Persistent -- functions specific to the model module App.Query.SomeModel where import Database.Esqueleto -- queries specific to the model

where I can use Esqueleto’s full edsl without having to worry about import/export business.

Moderation

The problem of “where does this term come from” manifests mostly in very large modules with a ton of imports. It’s not an issue to find where a term is from if you have a 100 line module with 5 imports. If you have a 1,000 line module with 20 imports, you’re in trouble. By breaking your modules up into smaller logical chunks, you can avoid this problem, at the expense of having your code spread out more.

Most codebases use a combination of qualified imports, explicit import lists, and open imports. The decision tends to be made in terms of some combination of taste and the design of the library/module that you’re importing. Consider these modules:

-- 1. Designed for qualified import import Data.Map ( Map ) import qualified Data.Map as Map -- 2. Basic enough that they don't need -- to be introduced import Control.Monad import Control.Applicative -- 3. Designed for *unqualified* import import Data.IORef import Control.Concurrent -- 4. Obscure enough that you might want -- to have an explicit import list import Control.Arrow ( first , ( &&& ))

This is a somewhat moderate import strategy. Unusual terms are imported explicitly, common terms are imported implicitly. Some libraries are designed to be imported and used in a specific manner.

What do we want?

Let’s summarize what we want out of our import/export situation:

Easy to find where an identifier comes from Not excessively verbose Tooling isn’t necessary to use the strategy It’s easy to write tooling for the strategy

With all that out of the way, I think I’m ready to talk about library design.

Library Design

There are a few ways to design libraries to handle the import/export pain.

Qualified Import Module Isolation Open import

Qualified Import

The containers library is designed to be imported qualified – that is, you must import it qualified in order to use it. If you don’t, you get ambiguous term errors. Any code that uses it typically has these two imports:

import qualified Data.Map as Map import Data.Map ( Map )

so that you can use the Map term unqualified and the functions for operating on Map s qualified, like so:

someMap :: Map String Int someMap = Map . insert "hello" 3 Map . empty ` Map . union ` Map . singleton "bar" 2

This has a problem: If you want to write a custom Prelude to cut down on import related boilerplate, you’re unable to do so with this strategy.

module MyPrelude ( module MyPrelude , module X ) where import Data.Map ( Map ) as X import Data.Set ( Set ) as X import Data.Text ( Text ) as X import Data.ByteString ( ByteString ) as X

When we import MyPrelude , we get the type names in scope. This is an improvement. But we still need to write out all the qualified imports to use the types:

module Main where import MyPrelude import qualified Data.Map as Map

There is currently no way to do a qualified reexport, which would fix this issue.

If you are intending for your module to be used qualified, I’d recommend making the intended name available as a top level module. Consider my library monad-metrics , which is designed for qualified import:

import Control.Monad.Metrics ( MonadMetrics ( .. )) import qualified Control.Monad.Metrics as Metrics

This is a lot of typing! Instead, in a new version of the library, I will do:

import Control.Monad.Metrics import qualified Metrics

where Control.Monad.Metrics will export the types, and Metrics will export the functions for operating on them. This cuts down on the effort required by the user.

This scheme requires a lot of maintenance on the part of the user, or a dependency on tooling that may or may not be available for a user’s editor solution. Furthermore, this encourages a style of naming where the same basic identifier gets used many times: empty is used 25 times in the Stackage database. This makes it more difficult for tooling to know what to suggest in these cases.

Module Isolation

This strategy hearkens back to the Esqueleto and Parsec examples I presented earlier. It also applies to some other libraries I’ve used, like the Swagger library. This is the easiest thing to do – you stop caring about stepping on anyone’s toes, and require that your users define functions that use your library in encapsulated, isolated modules, that they then reexport however they like. This makes a lot of sense when you’re defining an EDSL (embedded domain specific language) for working with something. Parsers, SQL queries, HTML DSLs, and Swagger definitions all fall into this role. Data structures and web servers typically don’t.

This approach puts a tax on users: it requires that they break functionality into a separate module. This is typically a good thing, but it asks more of users than a qualified import strategy or an open import strategy. Typically, there won’t be that many libraries that can use this scheme productively.

Open Import

The open import strategy is quickly becoming my favorite. The library is designed such that you can just import the whole thing without an import list and it’s easy enough to find it. If your library uses operators, you’re strongly encouraging your users to use this strategy, even if the rest of your library doesn’t fit it well.

To do this, you’ll need to incorporate a bit of redundant information into the identifiers you use. This is a sort of Hungarian notation.

Let’s look at some examples of libraries that take this design.

Data.IORef

import Data.IORef import Control.Concurrent main = do ref <- newIORef 100 fix $ \ loop -> do val <- readIORef ref if val >= 0 then do modifyIORef ref ( subtract 1 ) loop else putStrLn "Done!"

Control.Concurrent.STM

import Control.Concurrent import Control.Concurrent.STM main = do q <- newTQueue forkIO $ forever $ print =<< atomically ( readTQueue q ) forM_ [ 1 .. 1000 ] $ \ i -> forkIO ( atomically ( writeTQueue q i ))

Lucid

import Lucid view :: Html () view = do h1_ "Hello world!" div_ $ do p_ $ do "The consistent naming scheme " "and specific identifier name " "choices make this an easy lib" "rary to use with an open impo" "rt." ul_ $ do li_ "Lucid is just great." li_ "Fave HTML lib fo sho"

Now, where does newIORef come from? What does it result in? It creates a new IORef . Likewise, what about newTQueue ? It creates a new TQueue .

The Lucid functions all follow a simple convention that make them easy to use and purposefully avoid collision with other identifiers: the _ suffix of an HTML tag makes it easy to know that an identifier is from Lucid . The only collision I notice ordinarily is for_ .

If these modules were designed with qualified import in mind, we’d write TQueue.new , IORef.new , or Lucid.h1_ instead. However, that would cause us a few problems:

You’d have to write import qualified Data.IORef as IORef and import Data.IORef (IORef) in all of your imports that use it You can’t reexport the functions from IORef anymore, so you need to explicitly import them every time, leading to more boilerplate in a custom prelude.

How would Data.Map look like with this scenario?

import Data.Map main = do let a = insertMap "hello" 0 emptyMap b = singletonMap "goodbye" 1 c = unionMap a b print c

Aesthetically, I think I prefer Map.insert over insertMap . Unfortunately, until we’re able to re-export modules qualified, we’re unable to use the qualified imports conveniently.

IMO

In my opinion, designing libraries for open import is the most convenient and useful way to go. Alternatively, it would be nice to have a Template Haskell function that can take a module designed for qualified import and mechanically convert it to this style. Then you could design with qualified import in mind and people that want an open import strategy could simply use the function and make their own.