Built-in Types

Every value in Sway is of a certain type. Although deep down, all values are just ones and zeroes in the underlying virtual machine, Sway needs to know what those ones and zeroes actually mean. This is accomplished with types.

Sway is a statically typed language. At compile time, the types of every value must be known. This does not mean you need to specify every single type: usually, the type can be reasonably inferred by the compiler.

Primitive Types

Sway has the following primitive types:

  1. u8 (8-bit unsigned integer)
  2. u16 (16-bit unsigned integer)
  3. u32 (32-bit unsigned integer)
  4. u64 (64-bit unsigned integer)
  5. u256 (256-bit unsigned integer)
  6. str[] (fixed-length string)
  7. str (string slices)
  8. bool (Boolean true or false)
  9. b256 (256 bits (32 bytes), i.e. a hash)

All other types in Sway are built up of these primitive types, or references to these primitive types. You may notice that there are no signed integers—this is by design. In the blockchain domain that Sway occupies, floating-point values and negative numbers have smaller utility, so their implementation has been left up to libraries for specific use cases.

Numeric Types

All of the unsigned integer types are numeric types.

Numbers can be declared with binary syntax, hexadecimal syntax, base-10 syntax, and underscores for delineation. Let's take a look at the following valid numeric primitives:

0xffffff    // hexadecimal
0b10101010  // binary
10          // base-10
100_000     // underscore delineated base-10
0x1111_0000 // underscore delineated binary
0xfff_aaa   // underscore delineated hexadecimal

The default numeric type is u64. The FuelVM's word size is 64 bits, and the cases where using a smaller numeric type saves space are minimal.

If a 64-bit or 256-bit arithmetic operation produces an overflow or an underflow, computation gets reverted automatically by FuelVM.

8/16/32-bit arithmetic operations are emulated using their 64-bit analogues with additional overflow/underflow checks inserted, which generally results in somewhat higher gas consumption.

The same does not happen with 256-bit operations, including b256, which uses specialized operations and are as efficient as possible.

Boolean Type

The boolean type (bool) has two potential values: true or false. Boolean values are typically used for conditional logic or validation, for example in if expressions. Booleans can be negated, or flipped, with the unary negation operator !.

For example:

fn returns_false() -> bool {
    let boolean_value: bool = true;
    !boolean_value
}

String Slices

In Sway, string literals are stored as variable length string slices. Which means that they are stored as a pointer to the actual string data and its length.

let my_string: str = "fuel";

String slices, because they contain pointers have limited usage. They cannot be used as constants, storage fields, or configurable constants, nor as main function arguments or returns.

For these cases one must use string arrays, as described below.

String Arrays

In Sway, static-length strings are a primitive type. This means that when you declare a string array, its size is a part of its type. This is necessary for the compiler to know how much memory to give for the storage of that data. The size of the string is denoted with square brackets.

Let's take a look:

let my_string: str[4] = __to_str_array("fuel");

Because the string literal "fuel" is four letters, the type is str[4], denoting a static length of 4 characters. Strings default to UTF-8 in Sway.

As above, string literals are typed as string slices. So that is why the need for __to_str_array that convert them to string arrays at compile time.

Conversion during runtime can be done with from_str_array and try_as_str_array. The latter can fail, given that the specified string array must be big enough for the string slice content.

let a: str = "abcd";
let b: str[4] = a.try_as_str_array().unwrap();
let c: str = from_str_array(b);

Compound Types

Compound types are types that group multiple values into one type. In Sway, we have arrays and tuples.

Tuple Types

A tuple is a general-purpose static-length aggregation of types. In more plain terms, a tuple is a single type that consists of an aggregate of zero or more types. The internal types that make up a tuple, and the tuple's arity, define the tuple's type.

Let's take a look at some examples.

let x: (u64, u64) = (0, 0);

This is a tuple, denoted by parenthesized, comma-separated values. Note that the type annotation, (u64, u64), is similar in syntax to the expression which instantiates that type, (0, 0).

let x: (u64, bool) = (42, true);
assert(x.1);

In this example, we have created a new tuple type, (u64, bool), which is a composite of a u64 and a bool.

To access a value within a tuple, we use tuple indexing: x.1 stands for the first (zero-indexed, so the bool) value of the tuple. Likewise, x.0 would be the zeroth, u64 value of the tuple. Tuple values can also be accessed via destructuring.

struct Foo {}
let x: (u64, Foo, bool) = (42, Foo {}, true);
let (number, foo, boolean) = x;

To create one-arity tuples, we will need to add a trailing comma:

let x: u64 = (42);     // x is of type u64
let y: (u64) = (42);   // y is of type u64
let z: (u64,) = (42,); // z is of type (u64), i.e. a one-arity tuple
let w: (u64) = (42,);  // type error

Arrays

An array is similar to a tuple, but an array's values must all be of the same type. Arrays can hold arbitrary types including non-primitive types.

An array is written as a comma-separated list inside square brackets:

let x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];

Arrays are allocated on the stack since their size is known. An array's size is always static, i.e. it cannot change. An array of five elements cannot become an array of six elements.

Arrays can be iterated over, unlike tuples. An array's type is written as the type the array contains followed by the number of elements, semicolon-separated and within square brackets, e.g., [u64; 5]. To access an element in an array, use the array indexing syntax, i.e. square brackets.

Array elements can also be mutated if the underlying array is declared as mutable:

let mut x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
x[0] = 0;

script;

struct Foo {
    f1: u32,
    f2: b256,
}

fn main() {
    // Array of integers with type ascription
    let array_of_integers: [u8; 5] = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];

    // Array of strings
    let array_of_strings = ["Bob", "Jan", "Ron"];

    // Array of structs
    let array_of_structs: [Foo; 2] = [
        Foo {
            f1: 11,
            f2: 0x1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111,
        },
        Foo {
            f1: 22,
            f2: 0x2222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222,
        },
    ];

    // Accessing an element of an array
    let mut array_of_bools: [bool; 2] = [true, false];
    assert(array_of_bools[0]);

    // Mutating the element of an array
    array_of_bools[1] = true;
    assert(array_of_bools[1]);
}