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Style Guide

Ocaml

General

Our style guidelines are an extension of a couple of existing style guidelines. The first is ocamlformat, and it acts as the source of truth for most of our coding style. In fact, ocamlformat is a blocker on CI, so your code must be formatted by it's guidelines in order to be merged into master. Ocamlformat does not handle all important cases of style, however, as it is only defining and enforcing how code should be spaced out and indented. For anything which ocamlformat does not cover, the Jane Street styleguide should be referenced. This styleguide we define here is intended to be an extension of the janestreet styleguide, with more attention to detail in concern to a few specific constructs we use regularly throughout our codebase.

Mli Files

A *.mli file should not be included for a *.ml file if the *.ml file's automatically derived interface is different. Many *.ml files in our codebase consist of only signatures and a functor. In the case of those files, there is not purpose to redefining the *.mli file because there is no new or restricted information in that file. If a *.ml file contains implementations in the root structure, then a *.mli file should most likely be created.

Modules

Prefer Standardized Shortnames

The names t, T, and S are common shortnames used in modules to signify specific things.

The name t is used to represent the root type of a module. For instance, if there is a module Account which contains types and values related to accounts, then Account.t is the type of an account. The name t can also be used as a value iff there is only intended to be one value of the root type of the module. As an example, if you wanted to have a single global logger in a Logger module, the type Logger.t could be the type of a logger, and the value Logger.t could be the global logger value of type Logger.t.

The module name T is used to encapsulate the root type and basic definitions regarding a root type of a module. It is a common practice used when you want to instantiate some functors for a module's root type and have the instantiations appear in the module itself. As an example, it is common to call the Comparable.Make functor in order to derive various helper values/modules from a comparable type. In this case, if we had a module Account again, and we wanted to derive the Comparable.S signature, then we would define a module T in Account which defines a root type t and the required functions for the Comparable.Make functor argument (in this case, compare). With this T module, we can then include T and include Comparable.Make (T) in the Account module to bring in all related values/modules for the Account.t type. Here is a full example of that:

module Account = struct
  module T = struct
    type t = ... [@@deriving compare]
  end

  include T
  include Comparable.Make (T)
end

The module type name S is used for defining the root signature of a module. This is most commonly used when you have a module which contains a functor. In this case, we typically call the functor Make and declare the functor returns the type S, putting both of these values in the same module. Looking back at our previous example, Core_kernel's Comparable module follows this pattern: Comparable.Make is a functor which returns a Comparable.S.

Prefer One Type Per Module

As a general rule of thumb, each module should be scoped to a single type. This pattern helps isolate concerns and, in turn, allows value names to be shorter, as they are located by context. Take, for example, a Merkle_tree module. This module will need a type Merkle_tree.t which represents the entire merkle tree (or a node of it). A Merkle_tree will also want to have a path type. It is preferable to place this path type into it's own nested module (Merkle_tree.Path.t instead of Merkle_tree.path). To help understand why this is preferable, imagine we did put path in Merkle_tree.path. Now, Merkle_tree contains values (functions) that relate not only to the merkle tree type itself, but also the a path of a merkle tree. For clarity, it would be natural to prepend all of the value names related to a path with path_ (path_map, path_length, etc...). By isolating Path to it's own module, we can shorten these names while keep the context of values clear. Additionally, if we choose to in the future, we may encapsulate the implementation details of Path by applying a restrictive signature to it, which would make the separation of concerns more clear via compiler enforcement.

No Monkeypatching

Monkeypatching of modules is explicitly disallowed in our codebase. Monkeypatching is defined as the act of taking an existing module and redefining it with extended or modified values. More simply, it's anything of the form.

module A = struct
  module M = struct
    let x = ...
  end
end

module M = struct
  include A.M
  let y = ...
  (* or `let x = ...` *)
end

Monkeypatching may be the easiest path to getting code to compile sometimes, but in general, it creates confusion and/or technical debt in the codebase. If you need to monkeypatch a module, you should have a good reason as to why.

Functor Signature Equalities

Signature with statements for signatures of modules generated by functors should be limited to the form S with module M1 = M2 whenever possible. Replacement equalities := should be limited to include statements where portions of the signature need to be limited (for example, when a nested module in the signature is already defined at the current structure scope). The form S with type t = ... is also not preferred as it scales poorly as the number of common dependencies between signatures involved with a functor increases. Note that this places increased importance on the janestreet styleguide rule "Prefer standard signature includes to hand-written interfaces".

Functor Arity

Functor can have a maximum arity of 3 (arity is the number of arguments; in this case, the number of nested functors - functors returning functors). If a functor requires more than 3 modules as arguments, then the required modules should all be nested into one module. The standard pattern for this is to define a signature Inputs_intf for your functor, which will, in turn, define the module arguments to the functor. See below for a simple example.

module type Inputs_intf = sig
  module A : A.S
  module B : B.S
  module C : C.S
  module D : D.S
end

module type S = sig
  include Inputs_intf

  (* ... *)
end

module Make (Inputs : Inputs_intf)
  : S
    with module A = Inputs.A
     and module B = Inputs.B
     and module C = Inputs.C
     and module D = Inputs.D =
struct
  open Inputs

  (* ... *)
end

Code Idiosyncrasies

We use a particular style of OCaml. Here's some of the important things.

Parameterized records

type ('payload, 'pk, 'signature) t_ =
  {payload: 'payload; sender: 'pk; signature: 'signature}
[@@deriving eq, sexp, hash]

type t = (Payload.t, Public_key.t, Signature.t) t_
[@@deriving eq, sexp, hash]

(* ... *)

type var = (Payload.var, Public_key.var, Signature.var) t_

We're defining a base type t_ with type variables for all types of record fields. Then we define the record using these type variables. Finally, we instantiate the record with type t, this is the OCaml type. And also type var this is the type of this value in a SNARK circuit. We'll cover this more later. Whenever we want something to be programmable from within a SNARK circuit we define it in this manner so we can reuse the record definition across both types.

There is some talk of moving to OCaml object types to do this sort of thing so we don't need to deal with positional arguments. Perhaps I (@bkase) will write up an RFC for that at some point.

Ppx_deriving

type t = int [@@deriving sexp, eq]

This is the first time we've seen a macro. Here we use sexp from ppx_jane and eq from ppx_deriving.

Stable.V1

module Stable : sig
  module V1 : sig
    type t = (* ... *)
    [@@deriving bin_io, (*...*)]
  end
end

Whenever a type is serializable, it's important for us to maintain backwards compatibility once we have a stable release. Ideally, we wouldn't define bin_io on any types outside of Stable.V1. When we change the structure of the datatype we would create a V2 under Stable.

Property based tests

Core has an implementation of QuickCheck that we use whenever we can in unit tests. Here is an example signature for a Quickcheck.Generator.t of payments.

(* Generate a single payment between
 * $a, b \in keys$
 * for fee $\in [0,max_fee]$
 * and an amount $\in [1,max_amount]$
 *)

val gen :
     keys:Signature_keypair.t array
  -> max_amount:int
  -> max_fee:int
  -> t Quickcheck.Generator.t

Typesafe invariants (help with naming this section)

Often times in Mina, we need to perform very important checks on certain pieces of data. For example, we need to confirm that the signature is valid on a user-command we receive over the network. Such checks can be expensive, so we only want to do them once, but we want to remember that we've done them.

(* inside user_command.mli *)

module With_valid_signature : sig
  type nonrec t = private t [@@deriving sexp, eq]

  (*...*)
end

val check : t -> With_valid_signature.t option

Here we define With_valid_signature (usage will be User_command.With_valid_signature.t) using type nonrec t = private t to allow upcasting to a User_command.t, but prevent downcasting. The only way to turn a User_command.t into a User_command.With_valid_signature.t is to check it. Now the compiler will catch our mistakes.

Unit Tests

We use ppx_inline_test for unit testing. Of course whenever we can, we combine that with QuickCheck.

let%test_unit =
  Quickcheck.test ~sexp:[%sexp_of: Int.t] Int.quickcheck_generator
    ~f:(fun x -> assert (Int.equal (f_inv (f x)) x))

Functors

We are in the process of migrating to using module signature equalities -- see the above section and the rfc for rationale, but we still have a lot of code using type substitutions (with type foo := bar).

First we define the resulting module type of the functor, keeping all types we'll be functoring in abstract.

module type S = sig
  type boolean_var
  type curve
  type curve_var
  (*...*)
end

Then we define the functor:

module Schnorr
  (Impl : Snark_intf.S)
  (Curve : sig (*...*) end)
  (Message : Message_intf
    with type boolean_var := Impl.Boolean.var
    (*...*))
: S with type boolean_var := Impl.Boolean.var
     and type curve := Curve.t
     and type curve_var := Curve.var
     (*...*)
= struct
  (* here we implement the signature described in S *)
end

Custom SNARK circuit logic

This is also the first time we see custom SNARK circuit logic. A pattern we've been using is to scope all operations that you'd want to run inside a SNARK under a submodule module Checked.

For example, inside sgn.mli we see:

(* ... *)
val negate : t -> t

module Checked : sig
  val negate : var -> var
end

negate is the version of the function that runs in OCaml, and Checked.negate is the one that runs inside of a SNARK circuit.