Dotty is the new Scala compiler that is written in Scala 2 and it will be future Scala i.e Scala 3.0. The current version of Dotty is 0.24.0-RC1 and very soon the first stable version will be launched in the market.
Dotty is completely open source and it is available on GitHub.
With this blog, I am going to share you one of New Types that Dotty is coming up with: Intersection Type
An Intersection Type combine multiple types into one which has all the features of the individual types combined. You need to use ampersand & operator to combine the multiple types (like A & B).
Earlier in Scala 2, these were used as compound types A with B. Although, you can still make use of with keyword in Dotty, but internally it is interpreted as & and in future releases of Dotty, with keyword will be deprecated and removed.
Intersection Types in Dotty are commutative which means that A & B is same types as B & A, they both will hold the same values.
Example of Dotty’s Intersection Types –
You can find the complete example of Dotty Intersection Type from here.
In the example, there are two traits namely:
ResponseDataErrorHandling
And both the traits have common method whoAmI which is unimplemented. It means that any class who inherits these traits will have to provide the concrete implementation.
And there are two concrete classes using the above traits, which are:
SuccessResponseFailureResponse
Both the classes are Intersection of the two traits (ResponseData and ErrorHandling). And both of the concrete classes have implementation of method whoAmI. In both of them, its type is the intersection of ResponseData and ErrorHandling types.
And finally there is a handler method, which will act on the ResponseData & ErrorHandling intersection type. The method will return optional string as either data or error code.
The important thing to note here in this example, both the ampersand & and with keyword are used. And there is a reason for that.
You can not declare a class/trait with & keyword. This means, writing class A extends B & C is not a valid statement in Dotty. You still need to use with keyword here. But it will be deprecated in the future releases.
Key Takeaways –
- To create an instance containing both the types, one need to use
withkeyword for inheriting multiple traits. - Unlike
withtypes,&is commutative:A & Bis the same type asB & A. - You can use
&while defining a new type liketype P = ResponseData & ErrorHandling.
And then you can also use this type in method calls or pattern matching.
References-
