Make your functions return something meaningful, typed, and safe!

Features¶

Provides a bunch of primitives to write declarative business logic
Enforces better architecture
Fully typed with annotations and checked with mypy, PEP561 compatible
Pythonic and pleasant to write and to read (!)
Support functions and coroutines, framework agnostic

Installation¶

pip install returns

You might also want to configure mypy correctly and install our plugin to fix this existing issue:

# In setup.cfg or mypy.ini:
[mypy]
plugins =
  returns.contrib.mypy.decorator_plugin

We also recommend to use the same mypy settings we use.

Make sure you know how to get started, check out our docs!

Contents¶

Maybe container that allows you to write None-free code
Result container that let’s you to get rid of exceptions
IO marker that marks all impure operations and structures them

Maybe container¶

None is called the worst mistake in the history of Computer Science.

So, what can we do to check for None in our programs? You can use Optional and write a lot of if some is not None: conditions. But, having them here and there makes your code unreadable.

Or you can use Maybe container! It consists of Some and Nothing types, representing existing state and empty (instead of None) state respectively.

from typing import Optional
from returns.maybe import Maybe, maybe

@maybe  # decorator to convert existing Optional[int] to Maybe[int]
def bad_function() -> Optional[int]:
    ...

maybe_result: Maybe[float] = bad_function().map(
    lambda number: number / 2,
)
# => Maybe will return Some[float] only if there's a non-None value
#    Otherwise, will return Nothing

You can be sure that .map() method won’t be called for Nothing. Forget about None-related errors forever!

Result container¶

Please, make sure that you are also aware of Railway Oriented Programming.

Straight-forward approach¶

Consider this code that you can find in any python project.

import requests

def fetch_user_profile(user_id: int) -> 'UserProfile':
    """Fetches UserProfile dict from foreign API."""
    response = requests.get('/api/users/{0}'.format(user_id))
    response.raise_for_status()
    return response.json()

Seems legit, does not it? It also seems like a pretty straight forward code to test. All you need is to mock requests.get to return the structure you need.

But, there are hidden problems in this tiny code sample that are almost impossible to spot at the first glance.

Hidden problems¶

Let’s have a look at the exact same code, but with the all hidden problems explained.

import requests

def fetch_user_profile(user_id: int) -> 'UserProfile':
    """Fetches UserProfile dict from foreign API."""
    response = requests.get('/api/users/{0}'.format(user_id))

    # What if we try to find user that does not exist?
    # Or network will go down? Or the server will return 500?
    # In this case the next line will fail with an exception.
    # We need to handle all possible errors in this function
    # and do not return corrupt data to consumers.
    response.raise_for_status()

    # What if we have received invalid JSON?
    # Next line will raise an exception!
    return response.json()

Now, all (probably all?) problems are clear. How can we be sure that this function will be safe to use inside our complex business logic?

We really can not be sure! We will have to create lots of try and except cases just to catch the expected exceptions.

Our code will become complex and unreadable with all this mess!

Pipe example¶

import requests
from returns.result import Result, safe
from returns.pipeline import pipe
from returns.functions import box

class FetchUserProfile(object):
    """Single responsibility callable object that fetches user profile."""

    def __call__(self, user_id: int) -> Result['UserProfile', Exception]:
        """Fetches `UserProfile` TypedDict from foreign API."""
        return pipe(
            user_id,
            self._make_request,
            box(self._parse_json),
        )

    @safe
    def _make_request(self, user_id: int) -> requests.Response:
        response = requests.get('/api/users/{0}'.format(user_id))
        response.raise_for_status()
        return response

    @safe
    def _parse_json(self, response: requests.Response) -> 'UserProfile':
        return response.json()

Now we have a clean and a safe and declarative way to express our business need. We start from making a request, that might fail at any moment. Then parsing the response if the request was successful. And then return the result. It all happens smoothly due to pipe function.

We also use box for handy composition.

Now, instead of returning a regular value it returns a wrapped value inside a special container thanks to the @safe decorator.

It will return Success[Response] or Failure[Exception]. And will never throw this exception at us.

And we can clearly see all result patterns that might happen in this particular case:

Success[UserProfile]
Failure[Exception]

For more complex cases there’s a @pipeline decorator to help you with the composition.

And we can work with each of them precisely. It is a good practice to create Enum classes or Union sum type with all the possible errors.

IO marker¶

But is that all we can improve? Let’s look at FetchUserProfile from another angle. All its methods look like regular ones: it is impossible to tell whether they are pure or impure from the first sight.

It leads to a very important consequence: we start to mix pure and impure code together. We should not do that!

When these two concepts are mixed we suffer really bad when testing or reusing it. Almost everything should be pure by default. And we should explicitly mark impure parts of the program.

Explicit IO¶

Let’s refactor it to make our IO explicit!

import requests
from returns.io import IO, impure
from returns.result import Result, safe
from returns.pipeline import pipe
from returns.functions import box

class FetchUserProfile(object):
    """Single responsibility callable object that fetches user profile."""

    def __call__(self, user_id: int) -> IO[Result['UserProfile', Exception]]:
        """Fetches `UserProfile` TypedDict from foreign API."""
        return pipe(
            user_id,
            self._make_request,
            # after box: def (Result) -> Result
            # after IO.lift: def (IO[Result]) -> IO[Result]
            IO.lift(box(self._parse_json)),
        )

    @impure
    @safe
    def _make_request(self, user_id: int) -> requests.Response:
        response = requests.get('/api/users/{0}'.format(user_id))
        response.raise_for_status()
        return response

    @safe
    def _parse_json(self, response: requests.Response) -> 'UserProfile':
        return response.json()

Now we have explicit markers where the IO did happen and these markers cannot be removed.

Whenever we access FetchUserProfile we now know that it does IO and might fail. So, we act accordingly!

More!¶

Want more? Go to the docs! Or read these articles:

Do you have an article to submit? Feel free to open a pull request!

Inspirations¶

This module is heavily based on:

Indices and tables¶

Container: the concept →