I had never intended to avoid pinning nightly. This is an unfortunate thing
to have to do---require a _specific_ version of a compiler to build your
software; it's madness. But the unstable features utilized by TAMER (as
rationalized in `src/lib.rs`) are still worth the effort.
It's not _actually_ that case that we need a specific version of the
compiler, granted; this is outlined in `rust-toolchain.toml`'s
rationale. You should look there for more information; my approach still
utilizes explicit channels via cargo. Unfortunately, I had hard-coded it
previously, putting me in a bit of a bind an unable to override the behavior
without modifying the software.
The reason for this change is that `adt_const_params` has a BC break
involving the introduction of `ConstParamTy`. This is only the second time
I've been bitten by a nightly BC break; the other was the renaming of
`int_log`'s API, as mentioned in
709291b107. This pinning will in fact
mitigate those future issues---TAMER will be able to resolve the issue at
its leisure, and will further be able to continue to build earlier commits
in the future by simply re-bootstrapping with the committed nightly
version.
If you're curious of my rationale for wanting to inhibit toolchain
downloading during build, or use system libraries, have a look at GNU Guix's
approach to building software safely and reproducibly. In particular,
dependencies are also built from source (rather than downloading binaries
from external sources), and builds take place in network-isolated
containers. The `TAMER_RUST_TOOLCHAIN` configure parameter is meant to
facilitate these situations by giving more flexibility to packagers.
DEV-14476
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
The intent is to source this in shell scripts, like tests.
This exposes feature flags to shell scripts, but it doesn't do so in quite
the same way that Rust does---it doesn't apply the dependencies. While this
isn't needed now, it does make me a little uncomfortable, and so I may take
a different approach in the future.
DEV-13708
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.
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.
Cargo's default behavior is unfortunately to issue network calls each time
it is invoke in order to check for dependencies updates. This is not only
bad for reproducibility and privacy, but it's also a concern for supply
chain attacks, since most developers are unaware that this is occurring.
Instead, we pin to the lockfile. Installing dependencies can be done with
`cargo fetch` and updating dependencies must be explicitly done by the
developer, with the lockfile updated.
This is to support two things:
1. Early switch to 2021 Edition, which is stable Oct 21; and
2. To make use of unstable const features.
The rationale is that switching to nightly does not really have any
significant downside for us, given that TAMER is used only by us and
the only risk is that unstable features may change a bit, which can be
mitigated with certain precautions.
The rationale for each unstable feature will be documented as they are used,
including documentation on what would be required to remove it and what
functionality would be lost / need to change in doing so.
A previous commit used a rustdoc tool lint, but that support wasn't added
until 1.52.0 (2021-05-06).
Note that this represents the minimum _required_ version to build TAMER; you
can use a later version.
This is enabled by default in nightly, and is not available at all in
stable. Considering the PITA that it will be to go back and rewrite docs to
use the new format, and how important of a feature this is, we will just
make use of it now.
Given that developers should be doing TDD and therefore running this target
frequently, this has the effect of providing immediate feedback when
formatting is needed and outputting a diff. Developers will then quickly
understand what changes need to be made to avoid future issues (and can run
`cargo fmt` to fix it), at which point they'll rarely ever encounter
formatting errors.
The original purpose was to ensure pipelines fail when the formatter has not
been run.
Mike Gerwitz
Joseph Frazer