Hack Standard Library

The goal of the Hack Standard Library is to provide a consistent, centralized, well-typed set of APIs for Hack programmers. We aim to achieve this by implementing the library according to codified design principles.

This library is especially useful for working with the Hack arrays (vec, keyset, and dict).

For future APIs, see the experimental repository.

Examples

<?hh // strict

use namespace HH\Lib\{Vec,Dict,Keyset,Str,Math};

function main(vec<?int> $foo): vec<string> {
  return $foo
    |> Vec\filter_nulls($$)
    |> Vec\map($$, $it ==> (string) $it);
}

Finding Functions

Functions in the HSL are organized into namespaces according to the following rule:

If a function returns a particular type or only operates on that type, it belongs in that namespace.

Here are some examples:

"I want a vec containing the keys of a particular container."

Based on the vec return type, you'd look in the Vec namespace and come across Vec\keys. Instead, if you wanted a keyset, you'd look in the Keyset namespace and find Keyset\keys.

"I want the largest value in a particular container."

Because the function is a math operation, you'd look in the Math namespace and find Math\max and Math\max_by.

Full Documentation

Automatically-generated documentation is available on docs.hhvm.com.

Installation

This project uses function autoloading, so requires that your projects use hhvm-autoload instead of Composer's built-in autoloading; if you are not already using hhvm-autoload, you will need to add an hh_autoload.json to your project first.

$ composer require hhvm/hsl

Principles

• All functions should be typed as strictly as possible in Hack
• The library should be internally consistent
• Arguments should be as general as possible. For example, for Hack array functions, prefer Traversable/KeyedTraversable inputs where practical, falling back to Container/KeyedContainer when needed
• Return types should be as specific as possible
• All files should be <?hh // strict

Consistency Rules

This is not an exhaustive list.

• Functions argument order should be consistent within the library
  • All container-related functions take the container as the first argument (e.g. Vec\map() and Vec\filter())
  • $haystack, $needle, and $pattern are in the same order for all functions that take them
• Functions should be consistently named
• If an operation can conceivably operate on either keys or values, the default is to operate on the values - the version that operates on keys should have a _key suffix (e.g. C\find(), C\find_key(), C\contains(), C\contains_key())
• Find-like operations that can fail should return ?T; a second function should be added with an x suffix that uses an invariant to return T (e.g. C\first(), C\firstx())
• Container functions that do an operation based on a user-supplied keying function for each element should be suffixed with _by (e.g. Vec\sort_by(), Dict\group_by(), Math\max_by())

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md; in particular, new features should be contributed to the experimental repository instead.

License

The Hack Standard Library is MIT-licensed.