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.
The intent of this is to demonstrate how significant of an impact checking
byte arrays for UTF-8 validity will have, since the existing tests do not
make that clear (a static string in Rust is always valid UTF-8).
These benchmarks show that the cost when re-interning an already existing
value is +50%.
This is important, because the new reader will be interning a _lot_ of
duplicate strings, whereas the existing reader operates on byte arrays
without interning unless necessary. And, when it does, it does so
unchecked. But we'd rather not do that, since we cannot guarantee that
those XML files are valid (and not modified in some way).
Upcoming commits will have what I think is a reasonable compromise to this,
based on the fact that we'll be encountering _many_ duplicate strings in
parsing XML files.
DEV-10920
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.
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.
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!
This was originally omitted because there wasn't a use case for it. Now
that we're adding context to errors, however, an owned value is highly
desirable.
This adds almost no measurable overhead to the internment system in
benchmarks (largely within the margin of error).
Contrary to what I said previously, this replaces the previous
implementation with an arena-backed internment system. The motivation for
this change was investigating how Rustc performed its string interning, and
why they chose to associate integer identifiers with symbols.
The intent was originally to use Rustc's arena allocator directly, but that
create pulled in far too many dependencies and depended on nightly
Rust. Bumpalo provides a very similar implementation to Rustc's
DroplessArena, so I went with that instead.
Rustc also relies on a global, singleton interner. I do not do that
here. Instead, the returned Symbol carries a lifetime of the underlying
arena, as well as a pointer to the interned string.
Now that this is put to rest, it's time to move on.
For strings of any notable length, Fx Hash outperforms FNV. Rustc also
moved to this hash function and noticed performance
improvements. Fortunately, as was accounted for in the design, this was a
trivial switch.
Here are some benchmarks to back up that claim:
test hash_set::fnv::with_all_new_1000 ... bench: 133,096 ns/iter (+/- 1,430)
test hash_set::fnv::with_all_new_1000_with_capacity ... bench: 82,591 ns/iter (+/- 592)
test hash_set::fnv::with_all_new_rc_str_1000_baseline ... bench: 162,073 ns/iter (+/- 1,277)
test hash_set::fnv::with_one_new_1000 ... bench: 37,334 ns/iter (+/- 256)
test hash_set::fnv::with_one_new_rc_str_1000_baseline ... bench: 18,263 ns/iter (+/- 261)
test hash_set::fx::with_all_new_1000 ... bench: 85,217 ns/iter (+/- 1,111)
test hash_set::fx::with_all_new_1000_with_capacity ... bench: 59,383 ns/iter (+/- 752)
test hash_set::fx::with_all_new_rc_str_1000_baseline ... bench: 98,802 ns/iter (+/- 1,117)
test hash_set::fx::with_one_new_1000 ... bench: 42,484 ns/iter (+/- 1,239)
test hash_set::fx::with_one_new_rc_str_1000_baseline ... bench: 15,000 ns/iter (+/- 233)
test hash_set::with_all_new_1000 ... bench: 137,645 ns/iter (+/- 1,186)
test hash_set::with_all_new_rc_str_1000_baseline ... bench: 163,129 ns/iter (+/- 1,725)
test hash_set::with_one_new_1000 ... bench: 59,051 ns/iter (+/- 1,202)
test hash_set::with_one_new_rc_str_1000_baseline ... bench: 37,986 ns/iter (+/- 771)
This is missing two key things that I'll add shortly: a HashMap-based one
for use in the ASG for node mapping, and an entry-based system for
manipulations.
This has been a nice start for exploring various aspects of Rust
development, as well as conventions that I'd like to implement. In
particular:
- Robust documentation intended to guide people through learning the
necessary material about the compiler, as well as related work to
rationalize design decisions;
- Benchmarks;
- TDD;
- And just getting used to Rust in general.
I've beat this one to death, so I'll commit this and make smaller changes
going forward to show how easily it can evolve.
(This module was originally named `intern` but this commit and those that
follow rewrote it to `sym`.)
Mike Gerwitz