This represents a significant departure from how the XSLT-based TAME handles
the `@values@` param, but it will end up having the same effect. It builds
upon prior work, utilizing the fact that referencing a template in TAMER
will expand it.
The problem is this: allowing trees in `Meta` would add yet another
container; we have `Pkg` and `Tpl` already. This was the same problem with
template application---I didn't want to add support for binding arguments
separately, and so re-used templates themselves, reaching the generalization
I just mentioned above.
`Meta` is intended to be a lexical metasyntatic variable. That keeps its
implementation quite simple. But if we start allowing trees, that gets
rather complicated really quickly, and starts to require much more complex
AIR parser state.
But we can accomplish the same behavior by desugaring into an existing
container---a template---and placing the body within it. Then, in the
future, we'll parse `param-copy` into a simple `Air::RefIdent`, which will
expand the closed template and produce the same result as it does today in
the XSLT-based system.
This leaves open issues of closure (variable binding) in complex scenarios,
such as in templates that introduce metavariables to be utilized by the
body. That's never a practice I liked, but we'll see how things evolve.
Further, this does not yet handle nested template applications.
But this saved me a ton of work. Desugaring is much simpler.
The question is going to be how the XSLT-based compiler responds to this for
large packages with thousands of template applications. I'll have to see
if it's worth the hit at that time, or if we should inline it when
generating the `xmli` file, producing the same `@values@` as
before. But as it stands at this moment, the output is _not_ compatible
with the current compiler, as it expects `@values@` to be a tree, so a
modification would have to be made there.
DEV-13708
This applies to template application only; there's still some work to do for
template parameters in definitions (well, for deriving them in `xmli` at
least). And, as you can see, there's still a lot of TODO items here.
I ended up backtracking on tree edges to Meta, and even on cross edges to
Meta, because it complicated xmli derivation with no benefit right now;
maybe a cross edge will be re-added in the future, but I need to move on and
see where this takes me.
But, it works.
DEV-13708
This this a big change that's difficult to break up, and I don't have the
energy after it.
This introduces nullary template application, short- and long-form. Note
that a body of the short form is a `@values@` argument, so that's not
supported yet.
This continues to formalize the idea of what "template application" and
"template expansion" mean in TAMER. It makes a separate `TplApply`
unnecessary, because now application is simply a reference to a
template. Expansion and application are one and the same: when a template
expands, it'll re-bind metavariables to the parent context. So in a
template context, this amounts to application.
But applying a closed template will have nothing to bind, and so is
equivalent to expansion. And since `Meta` objects are not valid outside of
a `Tpl` context, applying a non-closed template outside of another template
will be invalid.
So we get all of this with a single primitive (getting the "value" of a
template).
The expansion is conceptually like `,@` in Lisp, where we're splicing trees.
It's a mess in some spots, but I want to get this committed before I do a
little bit of cleanup.
Small break from templates for something easier. I have COVID-19, so I'll
use that as my excuse for wanting to be more lazy.
The real reason is to see some more concrete progress and ensure that
patterns hold for simple expressions before further refactoring.
But, before I proceed with such refactoring, I really ought to approach
something that requires a NIR desugaring step, like case statements.
DEV-13708
Going higher than that doesn't make sense because we're in shell and
invoking commands all around this, so even milliseconds isn't going to be
entirely accurate here. However, what I am more interested in is observing
time relative to other runs; this isn't intended for profiling, but for
eyeballing unexpected behavior.
DEV-13708
There's a lot to look at, especially in the event of failure. Further, I
wanted to add additional statistics that could be eyeballed.
Right now, tamec is too fast (at least on my machine) for the precision of
/usr/bin/time: we need milliseconds, but we only get hundredths of a
second. So it'll all show as 0:00.00s. Which is okay, for now; it just
shouldn't exceed that. ;)
DEV-13708
The intent was to have a very simple implementation of `hold_dangling` and
have everything work. But, I had a nasty surprise when the system tests
caught bug caused by some interesting depth interactions as it relates to
`xmli` and auto-closing.
I added an extra test/example in `asg::graph::visit::test` to illustrate the
situation; it was difficult to derive from the traces, but trivially obvious
once I wrote it out as an example.
With that, templates can now aggregate tokens for dangling expressions.
DEV-13708
This won't try the fixpoint test if the prior one fails, which will always
cause that one to fail. And it further won't attempt the diff on
compilation failure.
DEV-13708
And finally we have tokens aggregated onto the ASG in the context of a
template. I expected to arrive here much more quickly, but there was a lot
of necessary refactoring. There's a lot more that could be done, but I need
to continue; I had wanted this done a week ago.
It is worth noting, though, that this finally achieves something I had been
wondering about since the inception of this project---how I'd represent
templates on the graph. I think this worked out rather nicely. It wasn't
even until a few months ago that I decided to use AIR instead of NIR for
that purpose (NIR wouldn't have worked).
And note how I didn't have to touch the program derivation at all---the
system test just works with the AIR change, because of the consistent
construction of the graph. Beautiful.
DEV-13708
Just as was done with the expression parser, which this will utilize. This
initializes it, but doesn't yet make use of it (`AirExprAggregate`).
Refactoring was definitely needed; decomposing this is quite a bit of work,
in no small part because of the complexity. This helps significantly.
DEV-13708
This sets the stage for template parsing, and finally decides how we're
going to represent templates on the ASG. This is going to start simple,
since my original plans for improving how templates are
handled (conceptually) is going to have to wait.
This is the last difficult object type to figure out, with respect to graph
representation and derivation, so I wanted to get it out of the way.
DEV-13708
Just as `rate` is a `sum`, `classify` is an `all` by default. The `@any`
attribute will change that interpretation, though I only intend to recognize
that in parsing later on, not emit that in XMLI.
DEV-13708
The element only, no attributes yet.
I'll keep forming boilerplate until abstraction points become obvious with
more variety; this is still pretty close to what was already supported.
DEV-13708
This was a fairly simple addition, since rate blocks already lower into sum
expressions; these are just non-identified.
This does emphasize that the nir::parse `ele_parse!` abstraction I spent so
much time on ended up not being a perfect fit, as it now has some
boilerplate after it was stripped of much of its capabilities some time ago.
Don't worry, `nir::air` and `asg::graph::xmli` will get cleaned up.
DEV-13708
This extends the POC a bit by beginning to reconstruct rate blocks (note
that NIR isn't producing sub-expressions yet).
Importantly, this also adds the first system tests, now that we have an
end-to-end system. This not only gives me confidence that the system is
producing the expected output, but serves as a compromise: writing unit or
integration tests for this program derivation would be a great deal of work,
and wouldn't even catch the bugs I'm worried most about; the lowering
operation can be written in such a way as to give me high confidence in its
correctness without those more granular tests, or in conjunction with unit
or integration tests for a smaller portion.
DEV-13708
This provides a test harness for running shell-based system tests. The
first of such tests will be introduced in the following commit.
This is done in place of integration tests written in Rust because it will
invoke the final binary exactly as the user or build system (using TAMER)
will, providing greater confidence. Besides, a lot of things are simply
more convenient to do in shell. ...though some of you may debate that.
DEV-13708
There are a number of reasons for this, where the benefits do not make up
for the losses.
First: this is actually invoking cargo. Not only is this not necessary, but
it's not desirable: cargo by default hits the network and does all sorts of
other stuff, when all we want to do is invoke the executable. So the tests
aren't really testing the right thing in that sense. See the previous
commit for more information.
The way it invokes cargo is different than the way the Makefile invokes
cargo, so on my system, it's actually invoking a _different cargo_! This is
causing problems, in particular with lock files, which causes my tests to
fail.
Importantly, this also removes a _lot_ of dependencies, which removes a lot
of supplier chain risk and a lot of code to audit. This provides
significant security benefits, especially given that what was being tested
was rather small, and could be done in a shell script.
TAMER will receive significant system testing later on. But for now, none
of this was worth it.
Further audits of dependencies will come later on. I've always been fairly
insistent on keeping the dependency graph small and auditable, but recent
supply chain attacks have given me a better way to rationalize the security
risk. Further, I'm the only one on this project right now.
We want to be able to build a representation of the dependency graph so
we can easily inspect it.
We do not want to make GraphML by default. It is better to use a tool.
We use "petgraph-graphml".
Add a stub executable that will eventually become a full-featured TAME
compiler. The first implementation will only copy the source file to an
intermediary file that will be compiled by the XSLT compiler.
We want to add an option to set the output file to the linker so we do
not need to redirect output to awk any longer.
This also adds integration tests for tameld.
Mike Gerwitz
Joseph Frazer