[Blog post] Candid for engineers

Developers
1

TL;DR: Candid for engineers

Hi! I wrote a blog post about Candid that I wish I had long ago.
I tried focusing on the practical aspects of the language and giving specific guidance on how to use it.

Let me know if I missed some aspects you wish to know. Enjoy!

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Very nice blog post, the FAQ part seems like something that should be added or linked to in the Candid reference.

Considering that smart contracts on the IC are upgradeable, this sort of information would help developers make backwards compatible smart contracts that don’t break after changes are made.

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Turns out it isn’t just for engineers after all. Also loved the ckBTC internals one. Thanks for sharing

4

Nice post! Well-explained, especially the FAQ. Nevertheless, I want to point out one extra complication (I believe you are aware of it, but some readers might not be).

The FAQ section states guide lines like:

You can safely add a non-optional field if the record appears only in method return types.

Now, this is true if you are only considering methods in types of service declarations, like:

service : {
  f : () -> my_record_type
}

However, and here is the subtle part, it is not true for service types in general. In Candid, you can freely define service types themselves. And because Candid is higher-order, it again depends on how such a type is used.

Here is an example. Consider:

type R = record { a : nat }
type S = service { callback : () -> R }
service : {
  register : (s : S) -> ()
}

This is a service that takes another service as argument. And that other service has R in the result of a method (only). Yet, it would be a breaking change (and is disallowed) to extend R with a non-optional field, because S itself occurs as a parameter, so the direction of all the rules regarding extensions of S has to switch around. It is, in fact, safe (and allowed) to remove field a in this particular example.

I expect that most devs will never run into this, because they don’t use service types (or function types) as parameters. But if you ever do, you might want to be aware.

So much for my nitpicking. :slight_smile:

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