Getting started

Install mkunion

Run in your terminal

go install github.com/widmogrod/mkunion/cmd/mkunion@latest

Define your first union type

Create your first union. In our simple example we will represent different types of vehicles. But in a more complex example you may want to represent different states of your application, model domain aggregates, or create your own DSL.

example/vehicle.go

package example

//go:generate mkunion

//go:tag mkunion:"Vehicle"
type (
    Car struct {
        Color  string
        Wheels int
    }
    Plane struct {
        Color   string
        Engines int
    }
    Boat struct {
        Color      string
        Propellers int
    }
)

In above example you can see a few important concepts:

//go:generate mkunion

Go generate directive runs mkunion command that you installed in previous step. It will generate union type and pattern matching functions for you.

//go:tag mkunion:"Vehicle"

Tag are powerful and flexible way to add metadata to your code. You may be familiar with tags when you work with JSON in golang

type User struct {
    Name string `json:"name"`
}

Unfortunately Golang don't extend this feature to other parts of the language.

MkUnion defines //go:tag comment, following other idiomatic definitions go:generate, go:embed to allow to add metadata to struct type. And MkUnion use it heavily to offer way of adding new behaviour to go types.

type (...) convention

Union type is defined as a set of types in a single type declaration. You can think of it as "one of" type. To make it more readable, as convention I decided to use type (...) declaration block, instead of individual type declaration.

Generate code

In IDEs like Goland run Option + Command + G for fast code generation

Or, run in your terminal

go generate ./...

Alternatively you can run mkunion command directly

mkunion -i example/vehicle.go

In future I plan to add mkununion watch ./... command that will watch for changes in your code and automatically generate union types for you. This will allow you to remove //go:generate directive from your code, and have faster feedback loop.

Match over union type

When you run mkunion command, it will generate file alongside your original file with union_gen.go suffix (example vehicle_union_gen.go)

You can use those function to do exhaustive matching on your union type.

For example, you can calculate fuel usage for different types of vehicles, with function that looks like this:

example/vehicle.go

func CalculateFuelUsage(v Vehicle) int {
    return MatchVehicleR1(
        v,
        func(x *Car) int {
            return x.Wheels * 2
        },
        func(x *Plane) int {
            return x.Engines * 10
        },
        func(x *Boat) int {
            return x.Propellers * 5
        },
    )
}

And as you can see, it leverage generics to make it easy to write. No need to cast, or check type, or use switch statement.

matching functions Match{Name}R1

Where Name is the name of your union type. Where R0, R1, R2, R3 stands for number of return values.

Example of MatchVehicleR1 function signature:

func MatchVehicleR1[T0 any](
    x Vehicle,
    f1 func(x *Car) T0,
    f2 func(x *Plane) T0,
    f3 func(x *Boat) T0,
) T0 {
    /* ... */
}

JSON marshalling

MkUnion also generate JSON marshalling functions for you. You just need to use shared.JSONMarshal and shared.JSONUnmarshal functions to marshal and unmarshal your union type.

Example:

func ExampleVehicleFromJSON() {
    vehicle := &Car{
        Color:  "black",
        Wheels: 4,
    }
    result, _ := shared.JSONMarshal[Vehicle](vehicle)
    fmt.Println(string(result))
    // Output: {"$type":"example.Car","example.Car":{"Color":"black","Wheels":4}}
}

func ExampleVehicleToJSON() {
    input := []byte(`{"$type":"example.Car","example.Car":{"Color":"black","Wheels":4}}`)
    vehicle, _ := shared.JSONUnmarshal[Vehicle](input)
    fmt.Printf("%#v", vehicle)
    // Output: &example.Car{Color:"black", Wheels:4}
}

You can notice that it has opinionated way of marshalling and unmarshalling your union type. It uses $type field to store type information, and then store actual data in separate field, with corresponding name.

You can read more about it in Marshaling union in JSON section.