This invokes clippy as part of `make check` now, which I had previously
avoided doing (I'll elaborate on that below).
This commit represents the changes needed to resolve all the warnings
presented by clippy. Many changes have been made where I find the lints to
be useful and agreeable, but there are a number of lints, rationalized in
`src/lib.rs`, where I found the lints to be disagreeable. I have provided
rationale, primarily for those wondering why I desire to deviate from the
default lints, though it does feel backward to rationalize why certain lints
ought to be applied (the reverse should be true).
With that said, this did catch some legitimage issues, and it was also
helpful in getting some older code up-to-date with new language additions
that perhaps I used in new code but hadn't gone back and updated old code
for. My goal was to get clippy working without errors so that, in the
future, when others get into TAMER and are still getting used to Rust,
clippy is able to help guide them in the right direction.
One of the reasons I went without clippy for so long (though I admittedly
forgot I wasn't using it for a period of time) was because there were a
number of suggestions that I found disagreeable, and I didn't take the time
to go through them and determine what I wanted to follow. Furthermore, it
was hard to make that judgment when I was new to the language and lacked
the necessary experience to do so.
One thing I would like to comment further on is the use of `format!` with
`expect`, which is also what the diagnostic system convenience methods
do (which clippy does not cover). Because of all the work I've done trying
to understand Rust and looking at disassemblies and seeing what it
optimizes, I falsely assumed that Rust would convert such things into
conditionals in my otherwise-pure code...but apparently that's not the case,
when `format!` is involved.
I noticed that, after making the suggested fix with `get_ident`, Rust
proceeded to then inline it into each call site and then apply further
optimizations. It was also previously invoking the thread lock (for the
interner) unconditionally and invoking the `Display` implementation. That
is not at all what I intended for, despite knowing the eager semantics of
function calls in Rust.
Anyway, possibly more to come on that, I'm just tired of typing and need to
move on. I'll be returning to investigate further diagnostic messages soon.
Various parts of the system have to be converted to use `diagnostic_panic!`,
which makes it very clear that this is a bug in TAMER that should be
reported. I just happened to see this one near code I was about to touch.
DEV-13156
This introduces NIR, but only as an accepting grammar; it doesn't yet emit
the NIR IR, beyond TODOs.
This modifies `tamec` to, while copying XIR, also attempt to lower NIR to
produce parser errors, if any. It does not yet fail compilation, as I just
want to be cautious and observe that everything's working properly for a
little while as people use it, before I potentially break builds.
This is the culmination of months of supporting effort. The NIR grammar is
derived from our existing TAME sources internally, which I use for now as a
test case until I introduce test cases directly into TAMER later on (I'd do
it now, if I hadn't spent so much time on this; I'll start introducing tests
as I begin emitting NIR tokens). This is capable of fully parsing our
largest system with >900 packages, as well as `core`.
`tamec`'s lowering is a mess; that'll be cleaned up in future commits. The
same can be said about `tameld`.
NIR's grammar has some initial documentation, but this will improve over
time as well.
The generated docs still need some improvement, too, especially with
generated identifiers; I just want to get this out here for testing.
DEV-7145
When we match a QName against a namespace, we ought to store the matching
QName to use (a) in error messages and (b) to make available as a
binding. The former is necessary for sensible errors (rather than saying
that it's e.g. expecting a closing `t:*`) and the latter is necessary for
e.g. getting the template name out of `t:foo`.
DEV-7145
This allows matching on a namespace prefix by providing a `Prefix` instead
of a `QName`. This works, but is missing a couple notable things (and
possibly more):
1. Tracking the QName that is _actually_ matched so that it can be used in
messages stating what the expected closing tag is; and
2. Making that QName available via a binding.
This will be used to match on `t:*` in NIR. If you're wondering how
attribute parsing is supposed to work with that (of course you're wondering
that, random person reading this)---that'll have to work differently for
those matches, since template shorthand application contains argument names
as attributes.
DEV-7145
This teaches XIRF to optionally refine Text into RefinedText, which
determines whether the given SymbolId represents entirely whitespace.
This is something I've been putting off for some time, but now that I'm
parsing source language for NIR, it is necessary, in that we can only permit
whitespace Text nodes in certain contexts.
The idea is to capture the most common whitespace as preinterned
symbols. Note that this heuristic ought to be determined from scanning a
codebase, which I haven't done yet; this is just an initial list.
The fallback is to look up the string associated with the SymbolId and
perform a linear scan, aborting on the first non-whitespace character. This
combination of checks should be sufficiently performant for now considering
that this is only being run on source files, which really are not all that
large. (They become large when template-expanded.) I'll optimize further
if I notice it show up during profiling.
This also frees XIR itself from being concerned by Whitespace. Initially I
had used quick-xml's whitespace trimming, but it messed up my span
calculations, and those were a pain in the ass to implement to begin with,
since I had to resort to pointer arithmetic. I'd rather avoid tweaking it.
tameld will not check for whitespace, since it's not important---xmlo files,
if malformed, are the fault of the compiler; we can ignore text nodes except
in the context of code fragments, where they are never whitespace (unless
that's also a compiler bug).
Onward and yonward.
DEV-7145
This begins generating parsers that are capable of parsing elements. I need
to move on, so this abstraction isn't going to go as far as it could, but
let's see where it takes me.
This was the work that required the recent lookahead changes, which has been
detailed in previous commits.
This initial support is basic, but robust. It supports parsing elements
with attributes and children, but it does not yet support the equivalent of
the Kleene star (`*`). Such support will likely be added by supporting
parsers that are able to recurse on their own definition in tail position,
which will also require supporting parsers that do not add to the stack.
This generates parsers that, like all the other parsers, use enums to
provide a typed stack. Stitched parsers produce a nested stack that is
always bounded in size. Fortunately, expressions---which can nest
deeply---do not need to maintain ancestor context on the stack, and so this
should work fine; we can get away with this because XIRF ensures proper
nesting for us. Statements that _do_ need to maintain such context are not
nested.
This also does not yet support emitting an object on closing tag, which
will be necessary for NIR, which will be a streaming IR that is "near" to
the source XML in structure. This will then be used to lower into AIR for
the ASG, which gives structure needed for further analysis.
More information to come; I just want to get this committed to serve as a
mental synchronization point and clear my head, since I've been sitting on
these changes for so long and have to keep stashing them as I tumble down
rabbit holes covered in yak hair.
DEV-7145
RSG (Ryan Specialty Group) recently announced a rename to Ryan Specialty (no
"Group"), but I'm not sure if the legal name has been changed yet or not, so
I'll wait on that.
This is a large change, and was a bit of a tedious one, given the
comprehensive tests.
This introduces proper offsets and lengths for spans, with the exception of
some quick-xml errors that still need proper mapping. Further, this still
uses `UNKNOWN_CONTEXT`, which will be resolved shortly.
This also introduces `SpanlessError`, which `Error` explicitly _does not_
implement `From<SpanlessError>` for---this forces the caller to provide a
span before the error is compatable with the return value, ensuring that
spans will actually be available rather than forgotten for errors. This is
important, given that errors are generally less tested than the happy path,
and errors are when users need us the most (so, need span information).
Further, I had to use pointer arithmetic in order to calculate many of the
spans, because quick-xml does not provide enough information. There's no
safety considerations here, and the comprehensive unit test will ensure
correct behavior if the implementation changes in the future.
I would like to introduce typed spans at some point---I made some
opinionated choices when it comes to what the spans ought to
represent. Specifically, whether to include the `<` or `>` with the open
span (depends), whether to include quotes with attribute values (no),
and some other details highlighted in the test cases. If we provide typed
spans, then we could, knowing the type of span, calculate other spans on
request, e.g. to include or omit quotes for attributes. Different such
spans may be useful in different situations when presenting information to
the user.
This also highlights gaps in the tokens emitted by XIR, such as whitespace
between attributes, the `=` between name and value, and so on. These are
important when it comes to code formatting, so that we can reliably
reconstruct the XML tree, but it's not important right now. I anticipate
future changes would allow the XIR reader to be configured (perhaps via
generics, like a strategy-type pattern) to optionally omit these tokens if
desired.
Anyway, more to come.
DEV-10934
This concludes the bulk of the header parsing, though there are surely going
to be other issues when I try to read a real xmlo file, such as
whitespace. That is something I expect that I'd rather handle as part of
XIRF, but maybe I'll initially ignore it here just to get it working. We'll
see.
DEV-10863
This parses the symbol dependency list (adjacency list).
I'm noticing some glaring issues in error handling, particularly that the
token being parsed while an error occurs is not returned and so recovery is
impossible. I'll have to address that later on, after I get this parser
completed.
Another previous question that I had a hard time answering in prior months
was how I was going to compose boilerplate parsers, e.g. handling the
parsing of single-attribute elements and such. A pattern is clearly taking
shape, and with the composition of parsers more formalized, that'll be able
to be abstracted away. But again, that's going to wait until after this
parser is actually functioning. Too many delays so far.
DEV-10863
This integrates much of the work done so far to parse into a
`XmloEvent::SymDecl`. The attribute parsing _is_ verbose, and I do intend
to abstract it away later on, but I'm going to wait on that for now.
The new reader should be finishing up soon, which is really exciting, since
I started working on this months ago (before having to take a break on
TAMER); I'm anticipating strong performance gains in the reader, and this is
a test that will tell us how the compiler will perform moving forward with
the abstractions that I've spent so much time on.
DEV-10863
This wasn't the simplest thing to start with, but I wanted to explore
something with a higher level of complexity. There is some boilerplate to
observe here, including:
1. The state stitching (as I guess I'm calling it now) of SymtableState
with XmloReaderState is all boilerplate and requires no lookahead,
presenting an abstraction opportunity that I was holding off on
previously (attr parsing for XIRF requires lookahead).
2. This is simply collecting attributes into a struct. This can be
abstracted away in the future.
3. Creating stub parsers to verify that generics are stitched rather than
being tightly coupled with another state is boilerplate that maybe can
be abstracted away after a pattern is observed in future tests.
DEV-10863
This adds a constant `ST_COUNT` representing the number of statically
allocated symbols, and uses that to estimate an initial capacity for the
`CachingEscaper`.
This is just a guess (and is certainly too low), but we can adjust later on
after profiling, if it ever comes up.
These traits augment Rust's built-in traits to handle failure scenarios,
which will allow us to encapsulate lowering logic into discrete,
self-parsing units that enforce e.g. schemas (the example alludes to my
intentions).
There isn't a whole lot here, but there is additional work needed in various
places to support upcoming changes and so I want to get this commited to
ease the cognitive burden of what I have thusfar. And to stop stashing. We
have a feature flag for a reason.
DEV-10863
This is an initial working concept for the reader which handles, so far,
just a single attribute. But extending it to completion will not be all
that much more work.
This does not have namespace support---that will be added later as part of
XIRT, which is responsible for semantic analysis. This allows XIR to stay
wonderfully simple, and won't have any impact on the writer (which expects
that QNames are unresolved and contain the namespace prefix to be written).
This is the safe version of the existing intern_utf8_unchecked, and exists
as a performance optimization.
We're about to introduce a XIR reader, which is going to intern a _lot_ of
duplicate strings, since it will intern node and attribute names as
well. Given that, we do not want to spent a lot of time performing UTF-8
checks that have already been performed.
We know that, if an intern is in the pool, it's either already UTF-8 or that
check was bypassed when it was initially interned. Therefore, if we find an
existing symbol, that can be returned without having to perform any
check. Otherwise, we intern as we usually would after attempting to convert
the byte slice into a string.
This allows us to continue to have good performance for interning without
sacrificing safety for strings.
This provides a child `raw` module that exposes a SymbolId representing the
inner value of each of the static newtypes. This is needed in situations
where the type must match and the type of the static symbol is not
important.
In particular, when comparing against runtime-allocated symbols in `match`
expressions.
It is also worth noting that this commit managed to hit a bug in Rustc that
was fixed on 10/1/2021. We use nightly, and it doesn't seem that this
occurred in stable, from bug reports.
- https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/89393
- 5ab1245303
- Original issue: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/72476
The error was:
compiler/rustc_mir_build/src/thir/pattern/deconstruct_pat.rs:1191:22:
Unexpected type for `Single` constructor: <u32 as sym::symbol::SymbolIndexSize>::NonZero
thread 'rustc' panicked at 'Box<dyn Any>', compiler/rustc_errors/src/lib.rs:1146:9
This occurred because we were trying to use `SymbolId` as the type, which
uses a projected type as its inner value: `SymbolId<Ix: SymbolIndexSize>(Ix::NonZero)`.
This was not a problem with the static newtypes because their inner type was
simply `SymbolId<Ix>`, which is not projected.
This is one of the risks of using nightly.
But, the point is: if you receive this error, upgrade your toolchain.
This moves the logic that sorts identifiers into sections into Sections
itself, and introduces XmleSections to allow for mocking for testing.
This then allows us to narrow the types significantly, eliminating some
runtime checks. The types can be narrowed further, but I'll be limiting the
work I'll be doing now; this'll be inevitably addressed as we use the ASG
for the compiler.
This also handles moving Sections tests, which was a TODO from the previous
commit.
DEV-10859
This is a significant departure from my original plans---this makes it
_easy_ to display symbol values, despite me not wanting that to occur unless
absolutely necessary.
The reality is, based on the design of the system, they will only occur in
these situations:
1. Writing to files;
2. Displaying errors;
3. Tests; or
4. People not following the design of the system.
The fourth one is the most risky as people begin to contribute in the
future, but the reality is that those can be fixed as they are encountered,
since if they're not showing up in a profiler, then they must not be causing
much of a problem.
This removes `SymbolStr` in favor of, simply, `&'static str`.
The abstraction provided no additional safety since the slice was trivially
extracted (and commonly, in practice), and was inconvenient to work with.
This is part of a process of relaxing lookups so that symbols can be
conveniently displayed in errors; rather than trying to prevent the
developer from doing something bad, we'll just rely on conventions, hope
that it doesn't happen, and if it does, address it either at that time or
when it shows up in the profiler.
This is a significant milestone, in the sense that it is the culmination of
the past month or so of work to prove that an Iterator-based XIR will be
viable for the system.
This barely had any impact on the performance from the previous commit
reporting the profiling. This performs at least as well as the quick-xml
based writer. In isolated benchmarks, it performs better, but in the real
world, the linker spends most of its time reading xmlo files, and so minor
differences in writing do not have a significant overall impact.
With that said, a lot of cleanup and documentation is still needed. That is
the subject of the upcoming commits, before this writer can finalized.
This contains some awkward coupling for opening and closing tags to reduce
the complexity of the `Iterator` types that must be manually
specified. That may be addressed shortly.
See the docs for a much deeper discussion. In summary: traits do not
support static methods, and this is the workaround, which relies on unstable
nightly constant function features.
This implementation is tested using `qname_const!`, and will be utilized
with a new static type in a following commit.
The `l:dep` section of the `xmle` file, after formatting (since XIR writes
without newlines and indentation), is now identical to the existing xmle
writer. I can now move on to the other sections.
Note that the attribute movement in this commit is simply to get the diff to
properly align. Once the current xmle writer is removed, I'll organize them
a bit more sensibly.
`obj::xmle::xir` also needs documentation, now that it's shown to be viable.
`IdentKind` needs to be written to `xmle` files and displayed in error
messages. String slices were used when quick-xml was used for writing,
which will be going away with the new writer.
This has been a long time coming, and has been repeatedly stashed as other
parts of the system have evolved to support it. The introduction of the XIR
tree was to write tests for this (which are sloppy atm).
This currently writes out the `xmle` header and _most_ of the `l:dep`
section; it's missing the object-type-specific attributes. There is,
relatively speaking, not much more work to do here.
The feature flag `wip-xir-xmle-writer` was introduced to toggle this system
in place of `XmleWriter`. Initial benchmarks show that it will be
competitive with the quick-xml-based writer, but remember that is not the
goal: the purpose of this is to test XIR in a production system before we
continue to implement it for a frontend, and to refactor so that we do not
have multiple implementations writing XML files (once we echo the source XML
files).
I'm excited to get this done with so that I can move on. This has been
rather exhausting.
The 16-bit interner at present will be used only for span contexts. In the
future, this interner may become specialized specifically for that, but for
now let's just re-use what we already have so that I can move on.
DEV-10733
I want to make it clear in the assertion that the problem could be caused by
duplicate strings. We do not sort by string, because in part we may in the
future want to group certain symbols together in some arbitrary way so we
can compare ranges (using the markers).
If that doesn't end up happening, it may be better to just sort by string
to obviate the problem.
It's really awkward not having them caps, when not only are constants
expected to be, but also that we cannot maintain consistency between the
string and the identifier name in even the simplest of cases.
(We could use `r#`, but that's too cumbersome.)
`StaticSymbolId` was created before the more specific types, which render it
unnecessary. If we need a generic type, it can be re-introduced, but using
`static_symbol_newtypes!`.
This is the interner that is intended to be used with the majority of the
system; the 16-bit interner is left around for the moment, but will likely
later become specialized.
This had the writing on the wall all the same as the `'i` interner lifetime
that came before it. It was too much of a maintenance burden trying to
accommodate both 16-bit and 32-bit symbols generically.
There is a situation where we do still want 16-bit symbols---the
`Span`. Therefore, I have left generic support for symbol sizes, as well as
the different global interners, but `SymbolId` now defaults to 32-bit, as
does `Asg`. Further, the size parameter has been removed from the rest of
the code, with the exception of `Span`.
This cleans things up quite a bit, and is much nicer to work with. If we
want 16-bit symbols in the future for packing to increase CPU cache
performance, we can handle that situation then in that specific case; it's a
premature optimization that's not at all worth the effort here.
We'll see how the syntax evolves over time. It's not ideal to have to
specify the type, rather than having the compiler infer it, but I don't much
feel like getting into my first procedural macro right now, so we'll stick
with this approach for the time being.
This will set the stage to be able to safely e.g. create QNames statically
at compile-time and would allow us to make any attempts to bypass it
unsafe.
Previously, we were allocating only u32 versions of `SymbolId` for the
statically allocated symbols. This introduces a new symbol type with a very
small datatype (8 bits) that is able to cast into any `SymbolId`. This is
explained in the docs.
We'll be taking this typing further in future commits so that static symbols
are better-suited for compile-time guarantees for static newtype
construction.
DEV-10710
This is the beginning of static symbols, which is becoming increasing
necessary as it's quite a pain to have to deal with interning static strings
any place they're used.
It's _more_ of a pain to do that in conjunction with newtypes (e.g. `QName`,
`AttValue`, etc) that make use of `SymbolId`; this will allow us to
construct _those_ statically as well, and additional work to support that
will be coming up.
DEV-10701
Fragments' text were unescaped on reading, producing an owned String and
spending time parsing the text to unescape. We were then copying that into
an internement pool (so, copying twice, effectively).
Further, we were then _re-escaping_ on write.
This was all wasteful, since we do not do any manipulation of the fragment
before outputting to the xmle file; we know that Saxon produced properly
escaped XML to begin with, and can trust to propagate it.
This also introduces a new global `clone_uninterned_utf8_unchecked` method.
In profiling this change, I tested (a) before this change, (b) after writing
without escaping, and (c) after both reading escaped and writing without
escaping.
(a) (b) (c)
sec mem (B) sec B sec B
0:00.95 47896 -> 0:00.91 47988 -> 0:00.87 48288
0:00.40 30176 -> 0:00.37 25656 -> 0:00.36 25788
0:00.39 45672 -> 0:00.37 45756 -> 0:00.35 34952
0:00.39 20716 -> 0:00.38 19604 -> 0:00.36 19956
0:00.33 16836 -> 0:00.32 16988 -> 0:00.31 16892
0:00.23 15268 -> 0:00.23 15236 -> 0:00.22 15312
0:00.44 20780 -> 0:00.44 20048 -> 0:00.41 20148
0:00.54 44516 -> 0:00.50 36964 -> 0:00.49 36728
0:00.62 55976 -> 0:00.57 46204 -> 0:00.54 41468
0:00.31 28016 -> 0:00.30 27308 -> 0:00.28 23844
0:00.23 15388 -> 0:00.22 15316 -> 0:00.21 15304
0:00.05 4888 -> 0:00.05 4760 -> 0:00.05 4948
0:00.41 19756 -> 0:00.41 19852 -> 0:00.40 19992
0:00.47 20828 -> 0:00.46 20844 -> 0:00.44 20968
0:00.27 18152 -> 0:00.26 18184 -> 0:00.25 18312
Interestingly, the peak memory usage increases very slightly between the
second and third steps (though decreases from the first), likely because the
raw (encoded) is larger than the unencoded text (e.g. `>` takes more
space than `>`).
Fragments were previously represented by `String` to avoid the cost of
interning (hashing and copying). This change modifies it to use uninterned
symbols, which does still have a copy overhead but it does not hash.
Initial tests shows a small performance decrease of about 15% and a small
memory increase of similar proportion. However, once I realized that I was
not clearing buffers from quick_xml events and implemented that change in a
previous commit, this change ended up being approximately on par with
`String`, despite the copying of some pretty large fragments.
YMMV, though, and perhaps on less powerful systems time may increase
slightly.
The upcoming XIR (XML IR) was originally going to support both owned strings
and symbols, but now we'll just use uninterned symbols; I can't rationalize
complicating the API at this time when it will provide an almost
imperceivable performance benefit. If ever that changes in the future,
that change will be entertained.
The end result is that the fate of a fragment's underlying memory is
determined by whatever is processing the data, _not_ by the API itself---the
API was previously forcing use of a String, whereas now it's up to the
caller to determine whether we want comparable interns. For fragments,
that's not likely ever to be the case, especially considering that the
representation will change so drastically in the future.
This adds support for uninterned symbols. This came about as I was creating
Xir (not yet committed) where I had to decide if I wanted `SymbolId` for all
values, even though some values (e.g. large text blocks like compiled code
fragments for xmle files) will never be compared, and so would be wastefull
hashed.
Previous IRs used `String`, but that was clumsy; see documentation in this
commit for rationale.
SymboldIds must only be constructed by interners, otherwise we lose
confidence in the type.
This offers an associated function to construct raw SymbolIds from integers
for testing purposes.
This is a major change, and I apologize for it all being in one commit. I
had wanted to break it up, but doing so would have required a significant
amount of temporary work that was not worth doing while I'm the only one
working on this project at the moment.
This accomplishes a number of important things, now that I'm preparing to
write the first compiler frontend for TAMER:
1. `Symbol` has been removed; `SymbolId` is used in its place.
2. Consequently, symbols use 16 or 32 bits, rather than a 64-bit pointer.
3. Using symbols no longer requires dereferencing.
4. **Lifetimes no longer pollute the entire system! (`'i`)**
5. Two global interners are offered to produce `SymbolStr` with `'static`
lifetimes, simplfiying lifetime management and borrowing where strings
are still needed.
6. A nice API is provided for interning and lookups (e.g. "foo".intern())
which makes this look like a core feature of Rust.
Unfortunately, making this change required modifications to...virtually
everything. And that serves to emphasize why this change was needed:
_everything_ used symbols, and so there's no use in not providing globals.
I implemented this in a way that still provides for loose coupling through
Rust's trait system. Indeed, Rustc offers a global interner, and I decided
not to go that route initially because it wasn't clear to me that such a
thing was desirable. It didn't become apparent to me, in fact, until the
recent commit where I introduced `SymbolIndexSize` and saw how many things
had to be touched; the linker evolved so rapidly as I was trying to learn
Rust that I lost track of how bad it got.
Further, this shows how the design of the internment system was a bit
naive---I assumed certain requirements that never panned out. In
particular, everything using symbols stored `&'i Symbol<'i>`---that is, a
reference (usize) to an object containing an index (32-bit) and a string
slice (128-bit). So it was a reference to a pretty large value, which was
allocated in the arena alongside the interned string itself.
But, that was assuming that something would need both the symbol index _and_
a readily available string. That's not the case. In fact, it's pretty
clear that interning happens at the beginning of execution, that `SymbolId`
is all that's needed during processing (unless an error occurs; more on that
below); and it's not until _the very end_ that we need to retrieve interned
strings from the pool to write either to a file or to display to the
user. It was horribly wasteful!
So `SymbolId` solves the lifetime issue in itself for most systems, but it
still requires that an interner be available for anything that needs to
create or resolve symbols, which, as it turns out, is still a lot of
things. Therefore, I decided to implement them as thread-local static
variables, which is very similar to what Rustc does itself (Rustc's are
scoped). TAMER does not use threads, so the resulting `'static` lifetime
should be just fine for now. Eventually I'd like to implement `!Send` and
`!Sync`, though, to prevent references from escaping the thread (as noted in
the patch); I can't do that yet, since the feature has not yet been
stabalized.
In the end, this leaves us with a system that's much easier to use and
maintain; hopefully easier for newcomers to get into without having to deal
with so many complex lifetimes; and a nice API that makes it a pleasure to
work with symbols.
Admittedly, the `SymbolIndexSize` adds some complexity, and we'll see if I
end up regretting that down the line, but it exists for an important reason:
the `Span` and other structures that'll be introduced need to pack a lot of
data into 64 bits so they can be freely copied around to keep lifetimes
simple without wreaking havoc in other ways, but a 32-bit symbol size needed
by the linker is too large for that. (Actually, the linker doesn't yet need
32 bits for our systems, but it's going to in the somewhat near future
unless we optimize away a bunch of symbols...but I'd really rather not have
the linker hit a limit that requires a lot of code changes to resolve).
Rustc uses interned spans when they exceed 8 bytes, but I'd prefer to avoid
that for now. Most systems can just use on of the `PkgSymbolId` or
`ProgSymbolId` type aliases and not have to worry about it. Systems that
are actually shared between the compiler and the linker do, though, but it's
not like we don't already have a bunch of trait bounds.
Of course, as we implement link-time optimizations (LTO) in the future, it's
possible most things will need the size and I'll grow frustrated with that
and possibly revisit this. We shall see.
Anyway, this was exhausting...and...onward to the first frontend!
Mike Gerwitz