Also known as metavariables or template parameters.
This is a bit of a tortured excursion, trying to figure out how I want to
best represent this. I have a number of pages of hand-written notes that
I'd like to distill over time, but the rendered graph ontology (via
`asg-ontviz`) demonstrates the broad idea.
`AirTpl::TplApply` highlights some remaining questions. What I had _wanted_
to do is to separate the concepts of application and expansion, and support
partial application and such. But it's going to be too much work for now,
when it isn't needed---partial application can be worked around by simply
creating new templates and duplicating params, as we do today, although that
sucks and is a maintenance issue. But I'd rather address that head-on in
the future.
So it's looking like Option B is going to be the approach for now, with
templates being closed (as in, no free metavariables) and expanded at the
same time. This simplifies the parser and error conditions significantly
and makes it easier to utilize anonymous templates, since it'll still be the
active context.
My intent is to get at least the graph construction sorted out---not the
actual expansion and binding yet---enough that I can use templates to
represent parts of NIR that do not have proper graph representations or
desugaring yet, so that I can spit them back out again in the `xmli` file
and incrementally handle them. That was an option I had considered some
months ago, but didn't want to entertain it at the time because I wasn't
sure what doing so would look like; while it was an attractive approach
since it pushes existing primitives into the template system (something I've
wanted to do for years), I didn't want to potentially tank performance or
compromise the design for it after I had spent so much effort on all of this
so far.
But my efforts have yielded a system that significantly exceeds my initial
performance expectations, with a decent abstractions, and so this seems
viable.
DEV-13708
Mike Gerwitz