equatable 3.0.0-dev.0

A Dart package that helps to implement value based equality without needing to explicitly override == and hashCode.

Simplify Equality Comparisons

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Overview

Being able to compare objects in Dart often involves having to override the == operator as well as hashCode.

Not only is it verbose and tedious, but failure to do so can lead to inefficient code which does not behave as we expect.

By default, == returns true if two objects are the same instance.

Let's say we have the following class:

class Person {
  const Person(this.name);

  final String name;
}

We can create instances of Person like so:

void main() {
  final Person bob = Person("Bob");
}

Later if we try to compare two instances of Person either in our production code or in our tests we will run into a problem.

print(bob == Person("Bob")); // false

For more information about this, you can check out the official Dart Documentation.

In order to be able to compare two instances of Person we need to change our class to override == and hashCode like so:

class Person {
  const Person(this.name);

  final String name;

  @override
  bool operator ==(Object other) =>
    identical(this, other) ||
    other is Person &&
    runtimeType == other.runtimeType &&
    name == other.name;

  @override
  int get hashCode => name.hashCode;
}

Now if we run the following code again:

print(bob == Person("Bob")); // true

it will be able to compare different instances of Person.

You can see how this can quickly become a hassle when dealing with complex classes. This is where Equatable comes in!

What does Equatable do?

Equatable overrides == and hashCode for you so you don't have to waste your time writing lots of boilerplate code.

Usage

First, we need to do add equatable to the dependencies of the pubspec.yaml

dependencies:
  equatable: ^3.0.0-dev.0

Next, we need to install it:

# Dart
dart pub get

# Flutter
flutter packages get

Lastly, we need to add the @Equatable annotation.

import 'package:equatable/equatable.dart';

@Equatable()
class Person {
  const Person(this.name);
  final String name;
}

We can now compare instances of Person just like before without the pain of having to write all of that boilerplate. Note: Equatable is designed to only work with immutable objects so all member variables must be final (This is not just a feature of Equatable - overriding a hashCode with a mutable value can break hash-based collections).

Recap

Without Equatable

class Person {
  const Person(this.name);

  final String name;

  @override
  bool operator ==(Object other) =>
    identical(this, other) ||
    other is Person &&
    runtimeType == other.runtimeType &&
    name == other.name;

  @override
  int get hashCode => name.hashCode;
}

With Equatable

import 'package:equatable/equatable.dart';

@Equatable()
class Person {
  const Person(this.name);

  final String name;
}

Benchmarks

You can check out and run performance benchmarks by heading over to benchmarks;

Maintainers

• Felix Angelov