Janet 1.4.0-655d4b3 Documentation
(Other Versions: 1.4.0 1.3.1)

Prototypes

To support basic generic programming, Janet tables support a prototype table. A prototype table contains default values for a table if certain keys are not found in the original table. This allows many similar tables to share contents without duplicating memory.

# Simple Object Oriented behavior in Janet
(def proto1 @{:type :custom1
              :behave (fn [self x] (print "behaving " x))})
(def proto2 @{:type :custom2
              :behave (fn [self x] (print "behaving 2 " x))})

(def thing1 (table/setproto @{} proto1))
(def thing2 (table/setproto @{} proto2))

(print (thing1 :type)) # prints :custom1
(print (thing2 :type)) # prints :custom2

(:behave thing1 :a) # prints "behaving :a"
(:behave thing2 :b) # prints "behaving 2 :b"

Looking up a value in a table with a prototype can be summed up with the following algorithm.

  1. (get my-table my-key) is called.
  2. my-table is checked for the key if my-key. If there is a value for the key, it is returned.
  3. If there is a prototype table for my-table, set `my-table` = `my-table's prototype` and go to 2. Otherwise go to 4.
  4. Return nil as the key was not found.

Janet will check up to about a 1000 prototypes recursively by default before giving up and returning nil. This is to prevent an infinite loop. This value can be changed by adjusting the JANET_RECURSION_GUARD value in janet.h.

Note that Janet prototypes are not as expressive as metatables in Lua and many other languages. This is by design, as adding Lua or Python like capabilities would not be technically difficult. Users should prefer plain data and functions that operate on them rather than mutable objects with methods. However, some Object Oriented capabilities are useful in Janet for systems that require extra flexibility.