Purity

Slint’s property evaluation is lazy and “reactive”. Property bindings are evaluated when reading the property value. Dependencies between properties are automatically discovered during property evaluation. The property stores the result of the evaluation. When a property changes, all dependent properties get notified, so that the next time their value is read, their binding is re-evaluated.

For any reactive system to work well, evaluating a property shouldn’t change any observable state but the property itself. If this is the case, then the expression is “pure”, otherwise it’s said to have side-effects. Side-effects are problematic because it’s not always clear when they will happen: Lazy evaluation may change their order or affect whether they happen at all. In addition, changes to properties during their binding evaluation due to a side-effect may result in unexpected behavior.

For this reason, bindings in Slint must be pure. The Slint compiler enforces code in pure contexts to be free of side effects. Pure contexts include binding expressions, bodies of pure functions, and bodies of pure callback handlers. In such a context, it’s not allowed to change a property, or call a non-pure callback or function.

Annotate callbacks and public functions with the pure keyword to make them accessible from property bindings and other pure callbacks and functions.

The purity of private functions is automatically inferred. You may declare private functions explicitly “pure” to have the compiler enforce their purity.

export component Example {
    pure callback foo() -> int;
    public pure function bar(x: int) -> int
    { return x + foo(); }
}