Mutation

Reason has great traditional imperative & mutative programming capabilities. You should use these features sparingly, but sometimes they allow your code to be more performant and written in a more familiar pattern.

Mutate Let-binding

Let-bindings are immutable, but you can wrap it with a ref, which is like a box whose content can change:

RE
let foo = ref(5);

Usage

You can get the actual value of a ref through the postfix ^ operator:

RE
let five = foo^; /* 5 */

Assign a new value to foo like so:

RE
foo := 6;

Note that the previous binding five stays 5, since it got the underlying item on the ref box, not the ref itself.

Tip & Tricks

Just kidding! ref isn't actually a special feature! It's just an ordinary syntax sugar for a predefined mutable record type called ref in the standard library (search "References" in that page). Here's the desugared version:

RE
let foo = {contents: 5};
let five = foo.contents;
foo.contents = 6;

Before reaching for ref, know that you can achieve lightweight, local "mutations" through overriding let bindings:

RE
let foo = 10;
let foo = someCondition ? foo + 5 : foo;
print_int(foo); /* either 15 or 10 */