The purpose of this macro is to provide a quick, easy, readable/writable, and efficient way to make code null-safe in scala.
Implementation | Null-safe | Readable & Writable | Efficient |
---|---|---|---|
🎉 ScalaNullSafe 🎉 | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Normal access | ⛔ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Explicit null-checks | ✔️ | ⛔ | ✔️ |
Option flatMap | ✔️ | ⛔ | |
For loop flatMap | ✔️ | ⛔ | |
Null-safe navigator | ✔️ | ||
Try-catch NPE | ✔️ | ✔️ | |
Monocle Optional (lenses) | ✔️ | 💀 | ⛔ |
thoughtworks NullSafe DSL | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Key: ✔️ = Good,
Add the dependency:
libraryDependencies += "com.ryanstull" %% "scalanullsafe" % "1.2.6" % "provided"
* Since macros are only used at compile time, if your build tool has a way to specify compile-time-only dependencies, you can use that for this library
import com.ryanstull.nullsafe._
case class A(b: B)
case class B(c: C)
case class C(d: D)
case class D(e: E)
case class E(s: String)
val a = A(B(C(null)))
?(a.b.c.d.e.s) //No NPE! Just returns null
val a2 = A(B(C(D(E("Hello")))))
?(a2.b.c.d.e.s) //Returns "Hello"
There's also a variant that returns an Option[A]
when provided an expression of type A
,
and another that just checks if a property is defined.
opt(a.b.c.d.e.s) //Returns None
notNull(a.b.c.d.e.s) //Returns false
opt(a2.b.c.d.e.s) //Returns Some("Hello")
notNull(a2.b.c.d.e.s) //Returns true
The macro works by translating an expression, inserting null-checks before each intermediate result is used, turning
?(a.b.c)
, for example, into
if(a != null){
val b = a.b
if(b != null){
b.c
} else null
} else null
Or for a longer example, translating ?(a.b.c.d.e.s)
into:
if(a != null){
val b = a.b
if(b != null){
val c = b.c
if(c != null){
val d = c.d
if(d != null){
val e = d.e
if(e != null){
e.s
} else null
} else null
} else null
} else null
} else null
The opt
macro is very similar, translating opt(a.b.c)
into:
if(a != null){
val b = a.b
if(b != null){
Option(b.c)
} else None
} else None
And the notNull
macro, translating notNull(a.b.c)
into:
if(a != null){
val b = a.b
if(b != null){
b.c != null
} else false
} else false
All of the above work for method invocation as well as property access, and the two can be intermixed. For example:
?(someObj.methodA().field1.twoArgMethod("test",1).otherField)
will be translated properly.
Also the macro will make the arguments to method and function calls null-safe as well:
?(a.b.c.method(d.e.f))
So you don't have to worry if d
or e
would be null.
For the ?
macro, you can also provide a custom default instead of null
, by passing it in as the second
parameter. For example
case class Person(name: String)
val person: Person = null
assert(?(person.name,"") == "")
There's also a ??
(null coalesce operator) which is used to select the first non-null value from a var-args list of expressions.
case class Person(name: String)
val person = Person(null)
assert(??(person.name)("Bob") == "Bob")
val person2: Person = null
val person3 = Person("Sally")
assert(??(person.name,person2.name,person3.name)("No name") == "Sally")
The null-safe coalesce operator also rewrites each arg so that it's null safe. So you can pass in a.b.c
as an expression
without worrying if a
or b
are null
. To be more explicit, the ??
macro would translate ??(a.b.c,a2.b.c)(default)
into
{
val v1 = if(a != null){
val b = a.b
if(b != null){
val c = b.c
if(c != null){
c
} else null
} else null
} else null
if(v1 != null) v1
else {
val v2 = if(a2 != null){
val b = a2.b
if(b != null){
val c = b.c
if(c != null){
c
} else null
} else null
} else null
if (v2 != null) v2
else default
}
}
Compared to the ?
macro in the case of a single arg, the ??
macro check that that entire expression is not null. Whereas
the ?
macro would just check that the preceding elements (e.g. a
and b
in a.b.c
) aren't null before returning the default value.
The macro is also smart about what it checks for null, so anything that is <: AnyVal
will not be checked for null. For example
case class A(b: B)
case class B(c: C)
case class C(s: String)
?(a.b.c.s.asInstanceOf[String].charAt(2).*(2).toString.getBytes.hashCode())
Would be translated to:
if (a != null)
{
val b = a.b;
if (b != null)
{
val c = b.c;
if (c != null)
{
val s = c.s;
if (s != null)
{
val s2 = s.asInstanceOf[String].charAt(2).$times(2).toString();
if (s2 != null)
{
val bytes = s2.getBytes();
if (bytes != null)
bytes.hashCode()
else
null
}
else
null
}
else
null
}
else
null
}
else
null
}
else
null
Here's the result of running the included jmh benchmarks:
[info] Benchmark Mode Cnt Score Error Units
[info] Benchmarks.fastButUnsafe thrpt 20 230.157 ± 0.572 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.ScalaNullSafeAbsent thrpt 20 428.124 ± 1.625 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.ScalaNullSafePresent thrpt 20 232.066 ± 0.575 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.explicitSafeAbsent thrpt 20 429.090 ± 0.842 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.explicitSafePresent thrpt 20 231.400 ± 0.660 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.optionSafeAbsent thrpt 20 139.369 ± 0.272 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.optionSafePresent thrpt 20 129.394 ± 0.102 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.loopSafeAbsent thrpt 20 114.330 ± 0.113 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.loopSafePresent thrpt 20 59.513 ± 0.097 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.nullSafeNavigatorAbsent thrpt 20 274.222 ± 0.441 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.nullSafeNavigatorPresent thrpt 20 181.356 ± 1.538 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.tryCatchSafeAbsent thrpt 20 254.158 ± 0.686 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.tryCatchSafePresent thrpt 20 230.081 ± 0.659 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.monocleOptionalAbsent thrpt 20 77.755 ± 0.800 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.monocleOptionalPresent thrpt 20 36.446 ± 0.506 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.nullSafeDslAbsent thrpt 30 228.660 ± 0.475 ops/us
[info] Benchmarks.nullSafeDslPresent thrpt 30 119.723 ± 0.506 ops/us
[success] Total time: 3909 s, completed Feb 24, 2019 3:03:02 PM
You can find the source code for the JMH benchmarks here. If you want to run the benchmarks yourself, just run sbt bench
, or sbt quick-bench
for a shorter run. These benchmarks
compare all of the known ways (or at least the ways that I know of) to handle null-safety in scala.
The reason ScalaNullSafe performs the best is because there are no extraneous method calls, memory allocations, or exception handling, which all of the other solutions use. By leveraging the power of macros we are able to produce theoretically optimal bytecode, whose performance is equivalent to the explicit null safety approach.
Some people have questioned the reason for this library's existence since, in Scala, the idiomatic way to handle potentially absent values is to use Option[A]
.
The reason this library is needed is because there will be situations where you need to extract deeply nested data, in a null-safe way, that was not defined using Option[A]
.
This mostly happens when interoping with Java, but could also occur with any other JVM language. The original reason this library was created was to simplify a large amount of
code that dealt with extracting values out of highly nested Avro data structures.
-
Using the
?
macro on an expression whose type is<: AnyVal
, will result in returning the corresponding java wrapper type. For example?(a.getInt)
will returnjava.lang.Integer
instead ofInt
because the return type for this macro must be nullable. The conversions are the default ones defined inscala.Predef
-
If you're having trouble with resolving the correct method when using the
?
macro with a default arg, try explicitly specifying the type of the default