How to define "proper" function in Fable

Hi,

if you spot the name “proper” in a title of this post I wanna say, that I don’t want to be a person that says “you should do that”/”you shouldn’t do that”, but simply give you an insight, how the definition of a function in F# would result in a Javascript code.

So to give a little bit of a context for this article. When I worked with a guacamole protocol and it’s javascript implementation I have to invoke a function named oninstruction(arg1, arg2). There is no available binding for it in Fable.Browser nor available nuget package for it, so we do our implementation. But after some tries, we discover, that we don’t invoke in the javascript method that we want. So how we could define a function in F# with multiple parameters and how they would be transformed via Fable to Javascript?

• Define function parameters as partial application

member val function: `TArg1 -> `TArg2 -> `TResult

And thanks to a Fable we would get the following javascript function

function (arg1){
    function (arg2) { ... }
}

Not really what we want to achieve, right?

• Define function parameters as tuple

member val function: `TArg1 * `TArg2 -> `TResult

Here is the Javascript representation:

function (tupleArg) {...}

The tupleArg would be a tuple with 2 elements inside. So still not the result we want to achieve

• Define a function with a Func<_>

member val function: Func<`TArg1, `TArg2, `TResult>

And here is our lovely javscript:

function (arg1, arg2) { ... }

As you could see there are 3 options (or even more, but we don’t try them) to define a function in F# which would result in different Javascript code. So keep that in mind, when you define your marker interface for Fable binding.

Thanks for reading!