[Feature Request/Question] Higher-Order Function with Receivers

Hi @Sintrastes, I'll be having a conversation with JB people hopefully soon and will definitely be touching Kotlin DSL syntax support.

Looking at your example what bugs me is that data class has a property of functional type, meaning that it stores not value but a behaviour.

One of the goals of the Ketolang language is to split data from functions, so a functional type should not be stored in data. Benefit that it gives is that Ketolang data types should be serializable w/o additional work from the developer, which is particularly helpful for caching Ketolang execution: function must produce same output for given input, meaning that parameters and return value can be cached — need to be serialized.

For now I'd like to point to Starlark examples (which is the language that inspires Ketolang):

rules_java Starlark Rules for building Java code via Bazel build system
BUILD file that uses these rules_java

As you can find in these examples there are just function invocations with data types, I do understand that Kotlin DSL is something many people got used to, especially with Gradle build.gradle.kts files, hopefully we'll figure out some consensus on that.

To add to this, there are few issues with Kotlin DSLs that I'm not sure we'll be able to solve:

DSL function can be called multiple times

(Example refers to kotlinx.html HTML)

html {
  body {

  }

  body {

  }
}

Here I've called body twice, that doesn't make much sense and not all DSLs will have meaningful way of handling multiple invocations of DSL builder blocks. And what makes it even weirder is that body could've been a property (see below, so it's an inconsistent design choice up-to developer).

As opposed to this where these are simple function calls with parameters that can be passed once:

html(
  body = body(children = listOf(h1(text = "abc"))),
)

Writing DSL in Kotlin is quite confusing

DSL requires writing functions with receivers A.(B) -> C

fun html(init: HTML.() -> Unit): HTML {
    val html = HTML()  // create the receiver object
    html.init()        // pass the receiver object to the lambda
    return html
}

Even for people with years of production Kotlin use this looks confusing. Ketolang aims to be generic configuration language and many of the Kotlin features I've limited so far are limited for sake of simplicity for people w/o Kotlin experience.

Kotlin DSL allows both properties and functions

Property probably means that a value is stored once, function probably means that value can be stored once or multiple times I guess, but that is all up to DSL developer, one can override property setter and accept multiple property assignments into a combined data type. It's all around confusing I'd say. In HTML example above body could've property, but it is a function, why…? Ketolang can limit DSL syntax, but yeah.

// See https://proandroiddev.com/writing-dsls-in-kotlin-part-2-cd9dcd0c4715
val person = person {
    name = "John"
    dateOfBirth = "1980-12-01"
    address {
        street = "Main Street"
        number = 12
        city = "London"
    }
    address {
        street = "Dev Avenue"
        number = 42
        city = "Paris"
    }
}

Ketolang aims to gently suggest different users to write similar code in similar way, this is why for now interfaces and other OOP features are disabled.

Kotlin DSL requires mutable state

// See https://proandroiddev.com/writing-dsls-in-kotlin-part-2-cd9dcd0c4715
val person = person {
    name = "John"
    address {}
}

class PersonBuilder {
    var name: String = ""
    private val addresses = mutableListOf<Address>()
}

This perhaps can be generically solved by declaring that mutable state in a function, rather than a class, as you cleverly did in your example which I find honestly better than having mutable builder classes. However, I'm not sure this is reusable when you need to share builder like you do for HTML where many tags are compatible with each other and you kind of need to expose builders to each other?

These are my current thoughts on Kotlin DSLs in Ketolang, please post your thoughts and ideas, thanks!

buildfoundation / ketolang