Proposal: Optional "return" as Syntactic Sugar in ReScript 13

[hyperpolymath]

Author: Jonathan Jewell Status: Draft / RFC Goal: Facilitate onboarding for JS/TS developers without compromising ReScript’s functional core.

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Overview

Add return as optional syntactic sugar for function expressions. This desugars to the last expression during compilation, with zero semantic or performance impact.

Current ReScript | Proposed (Sugar) | Desugared Output -- | -- | -- let add = (a, b) => a + b | let add = (a, b) => return a + b | let add = (a, b) => a + b

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Call to Action

• If this sounds good, I am offering to:
  • Implement the prototype and draft documentation.
  • Monitor community feedback and report back before ReScript 14.
• Proposal team:
  • Greenlight: To try it as an experiment, see what the reception is.
  • Feedback: Suggest improvements or dealbreakers.
  • Veto: If the team feels this is misaligned, we can drop it - no hard feelings!

Final Note:

This is not about changing ReScript, but I think it is useful in helping onboard more developers to discover why it is great and helps users implement some of the most basic functions in their language in Rescript. If it does not work or is received poorly, we can kill it without any issue. But in any case, it is optional for use, and - as sugar - and would not anticipate any reason to affect backward compat or future ambitions for the language.

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Next Steps:

1. Discuss in the next core team meeting.
2. If approved, I’ll open a PR for the prototype.
3. Interact with the community via an RFC or blog post.

[cristianoc]

Early return was discussed before. In general, I think people would like to see it.
What was never done, is a clear design of what the desugaring will look like, including corner cases and possibly error messages (imagined, as it's design at this stage).
In particular, what happens when return happens in the middle of the code, if one needs to worry about async, exceptions etc.
The design should consider these cases and assess implementation complexity.

[hyperpolymath]

Wow, rapid response for the weekend, thank you!
Would you like me to explore this then or concentrate elsewhere?
I am happy to do so if you think it would be a useful thing to look at.
Also, if you feel that there is something else, other than string handling, that I might give time to, let me know. And is this the best place for such discussions?