A previous commit mentioned that there's not a place for `Dim`, and
duplicated it between `asg` and `xmlo`. Well, `Dtype` is also needed in
both, and so here's a home for now.
`Dtype` has always been an inappropriate detail for the system and will one
day be removed entirely in favor of higher-level types; the machine
representation is up to the compiler to decide.
DEV-11864
This matches xmlo::Dim, and could be the same thing, if we can find a home
for it in the future; it's not worth creating such a home right now when I'm
not yet sure what else ought to live there; the duplication may be fine.
The conversion from xmlo needs to be moved, and `Dim` is going to be used
for more than just identifiers (expressions will have type inference
performed).
DEV-11864
Previously, since the graph contained only identifiers, discovered roots
were stored in a separate vector and exposed to the caller. This not only
leaked details, but added complexity; this was left over from the
refactoring of the proof-of-concept linker some time ago.
This moves the root management into the ASG itself, mostly, with one item
being left over for now in the asg_builder (eligibility classifications).
There are two roots that were added automatically:
- __yield
- __worksheet
The former has been removed and is now expected to be explicitly mapped in
the return map, which is now enforced with an extern in `core/base`. This
is still special, in the sense that it is explicitly referenced by the
generated code, but there's nothing inherently special about it and I'll
continue to generalize it into oblivion in the future, such that the final
yield is just a convention.
`__worksheet` is the only symbol of type `IdentKind::Worksheet`, and so that
was generalized just as the meta and map entries were.
The goal in the future will be to have this more under the control of the
source language, and to consolodate individual roots under packages, so that
the _actual_ roots are few.
As far as the actual ASG goes: this introduces a single root node that is
used as the sole reference for reachability analysis and topological
sorting. The edges of that root node replace the vector that was removed.
DEV-11864
In the actual implementation (outside of tests), this is always looking up
before adding the symbol. This will simplify the API, while still retaining
errors, since the identifier will fail the state transition if the
identifier did not exist before attempting to set a fragment. So while this
is slower in microbenchmarks, this has no effect on real-world performance.
Further, I'm refactoring toward a streaming ASG aggregation, which is a lot
easier if we do not need to perform lookups in a separate step from the
ASG's primitives.
DEV-11864
These traits are no longer necessary now that I'm using concrete types; they
just add unnecessary noise and confusion as I attempt to further refactor.
Don't abstract prematurely.
DEV-11864
This removes the generic on the Asg (which was formerly BaseAsg),
hard-coding `IdentObject`, which will further evolve. This makes the IR an
actual concrete IR rather than an abstract data structure.
These tests bring me back a bit, since they were written as I was still
becoming familiar with Rust.
DEV-11864
This is the beginning of an incremental refactoring to remove generics, to
simplify the ASG. When I initially wrote the linker, I wasn't sure what
direction I was going in, but I was also negatively influenced by more
traditional approaches to both design and unit testing.
If we're going to call the ASG an IR, then it needs to be one---if the core
of the IR is generic, then it's more like an abstract data structure than
anything. We can abstract around the IR to slice it up into components that
are a little easier to reason about and understand how responsibilities are
segregated.
DEV-11864
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 working concept that will continue to evolve. I wanted to start
with some basic output before getting too carried away, since there's a lot
of potential here.
This is heavily influenced by Rust's helpful diagnostic messages, but will
take some time to realize a lot of the things that Rust does. The next step
will be to resolve line and column numbers, and then possibly include
snippets and underline spans, placing the labels alongside them. I need to
balance this work with everything else I have going on.
This is a large commit, but it converts the existing Error Display impls
into Diagnostic. This separation is a bit verbose, so I'll see how this
ends up evolving.
Diagnostics are tied to Error at the moment, but I imagine in the future
that any object would be able to describe itself, error or not, which would
be useful in the future both for the Summary Page and for query
functionality, to help developers understand the systems they are writing
using TAME.
Output is integrated into tameld only in this commit; I'll add tamec
next. Examples of what this outputs are available in the test cases in this
commit.
DEV-10935
This entirely removes the old XmloReader that has since been replaced with a
XIR-based reader.
I had been holding off on this because the new reader is slower, pending
performance optimizations (which I'll do a little later on), however the
performance loss is of no practical consideration and only affects the
linker, which is still fast.
Therefore, it's better to get this old code out of the way to simplify
refactoring going forward. In particular, I'm working on the diagnostic
system.
This is a little sad, in a way---this is some of my first Rust code that I'm
deleting.
DEV-10935
This aggregates all non-panic errors that can occur during link time, making
`Box<dyn Error>` unnecessary. I've been wanting to do this for a long time,
so it's nice seeing this come together. This is a powerful tool, in that we
know, at compile time, all errors that can occur, and properly report on
them and compose them. This method of error composition ensures that all
errors have a chance to be handled within their context, though it'll take
time to do so in a decent way.
This just maintains compatibility with the dynamic dispatch that was
previous occurring. This work is being done to introduce the initial
diagnostic system, which was really difficult/confusing to do without proper
errors types at the top level, considering the toplevel is responsible for
triggering the diagnostic reporting.
The cycle error is in particular going to be interesting once the system is
in place, especially once it provides spans in the future, since it will
guide the user through the code to understand how the cycle formed.
More to come.
DEV-10935
tamec and tameld will now both introduce a `Context` to XIR, which will use
it to create spans.
Here's an example of an error, now that it's all working well together:
$ target/release/tameld --emit xmle -o /dev/null path/to/package.xmlo
error: invalid preproc:sym/@dim `9` at [/../path/to/package.xmlo offset 1175451-1175452]
A future task will make this human-readable by producing line and column
numbers, and perhaps even a snippet (if not now, then eventually).
It's exciting to see this coming together finally.
DEV-10934
This removes the flag from most of the code, which also resolves the
indentation. Not only was it bothering me, but I don't want (a) every line
modified when the module body is hoisted and (b) `rustfmt` to reformat
everything when that happens.
This means that everything will be built, even though it's not used, when
the flag is off, but I see that as a good thing.
DEV-10863
This introduces a WIP lowering operation, abstracting away quite a bit of
the manual wiring work, which is really important to providing an API that
provides the proper level of abstraction for actually understanding what the
system is doing.
This does not yet have tests associated with it---I had started, but it's a
lot of work and boilerplate for something that is going to
evolve. Generally, I wouldn't use that as an excuse, but the robust type
definitions in play, combined with the tiny amount of actual logic, provide
a pretty high level of confidence. It's very difficult to wire these types
together and produce something incorrect without doing something obviously
bad.
Similarly, I'm holding off on proper docs too, though I did write some
information here.
More to come, after I actually get to work on the XmloReader.
On a side note: I'm happy to have made progress on this, since this wiring
is something I've been dreading and wondering about since before the Parser
abstraction even existed.
Note also that this makes parser::feed_toks private again---I don't intend
to support push parsers yet, since they're only needed internally. Maybe
for error recovery, but I'll wait to decide until it's actually needed.
DEV-10863
This begins to transition XmloReader into a ParseState. Unlike previous
changes where ParseStates were composed into a single ParseState, this is
instead a lowering operation that will take the output of one Parser and
provide it to another.
The mess in ld::poc (...which still needs to be refactored and removed)
shows the concept, which will be abstracted away. This won't actually get
to the ASG in order to test that that this works with the
wip-xmlo-xir-reader flag on (development hasn't gotten that far yet), but
since it type-checks, it should conceptually work.
Wiring lowering operations together is something that I've been dreading for
months, but my approach of only abstracting after-the-fact has helped to
guide a sane approach for this. For some definition of "sane".
It's also worth noting that AsgBuilder will too become a ParseState
implemented as another lowering operation, so:
XIR -> XIRF -> XMLO -> ASG
These steps will all be streaming, with iteration happening only at the
topmost level. For this reason, it's important that ASG not be responsible
for doing that pull, and further we should propagate Parsed::Incomplete
rather than filtering it out and looping an indeterminate number of times
outside of the toplevel.
One final note: the choice of 64 for the maximum depth is entirely
arbitrary and should be more than generous; it'll be finalized at some point
in the future once I actually evaluate what maximum depth is reasonable
based on how the system is used, with some added growing room.
DEV-10863
This is simply not worth it; the size is not going to be the bottleneck (at
least any time soon) and the generic not only pollutes all the things that
will use ASG in the near future, but is also incompatible with the SymbolId
default that is used everywhere; if we have to force it to 32 bits anyway,
then we may as well just default it right off the bat.
I thought that this seemed like a good idea at the time, and saving bits is
certainly tempting, but it was premature.
Note that AttrParse{r=>}State needs renaming, and Stack will get a better
name down the line too. This commit message is accurate, but confusing.
This performs the long-awaited task of trying to observe, concretely, how to
combine two automata. This has the effect of stitching together the state
machines, such that the union of the two is equivalent to the original
monolith.
The next step will be to abstract this away.
There are some important things to note here. First, this introduces a new
"dead" state concept, where here a dead state is defined as an _accepting_
state that has no state transitions for the given input token. This is more
strict than a dead state as defined in, for example, the Dragon Book, where
backtracking may occur.
The reason I chose for a Dead state to be accepting is simple: it represents
a lookahead situation. It says, "I don't know what this token is, but I've
done my job, so it may be useful in a parent context". The "I've done my
job" part is only applicable in an accepting state.
If the parser is _not_ in an accepting state, then an unknown token is
simply an error; we should _not_ try to backtrack or anything of the sort,
because we want only a single token of lookahead.
The reason this was done is because it's otherwise difficult to compose the
two parsers without requiring that AttrEnd exist in every XIR stream; this
has always been an awkward delimiter that was introduced to make the parser
LL(0), but I tried to compromise by saying that it was optional. Of course,
I knew that decision caused awkward inconsistencies, I had just hoped that
those inconsistencies wouldn't manifest in practical issues.
Well, now it did, and the benefits of AttrEnd that we had in the previous
construction do not exist in this one. Consequently, it makes more sense to
simply go from LL(0) to LL(1), which makes AttrEnd unnecessary, and a future
commit will remove it entirely.
All of this information will be documented, but I want to get further in
the implementation first to make sure I don't change course again and
therefore waste my time on docs.
DEV-11268
This removes XIRT support for attribute fragments. The reason is that
because this is a write-only operation---fragments are used to concatenate
SymbolIds without reallocation, which can only happen if we are generating
XIR internally.
Given that this cannot happen during read, it was a mistake to complicate
the parsers. But it makes sense why I did originally, given that the XIRT
parser was written for simplifying test cases. But now that we want parsers
for real, and are writing production-quality parsers, this extra complexity
is very undesirable.
As a bonus, we also avoid any potential for heap allocations related to
attributes. Granted, they didn't _really_ exist to begin with, but it was
part of XIRT, and was ugly.
DEV-11268
To maintain a proper abstraction, this cannot be the responsibility of the
caller; most callers should not know that fragments exist, letalone how to
handle them.
Like previous commits, this replaces the explicit escaping context with the
convention that all values retrieved from `xir` are unescaped on read and
escaped on write.
Comments are a notable TODO, since we must escape only `--`.
CData is also an issue. I had _expected_ to use it as a means to avoid
unescaping fragments, but I had forgotten that quick_xml hard-codes escaping
on read, so that it can re-use BytesStart! That is terribly unfortunate,
and may result in us having to re-implement our own read method in the
future to avoid this nonsense. So I'm just leaving it as a TODO for now.
DEV-11081
This rewrites a good portion of the previous commit.
Rather than explicitly storing whether a given string has been escaped, we
can instead assume that all SymbolIds leaving or entering XIR are unescaped,
because there is no reason for any other part of the system to deal with
such details of XML documents.
Given that, we need only unescape on read and escape on write. This is
customary, so why didn't I do that to begin with?
The previous commit outlines the reason, mainly being an optimization for
the echo writer that is upcoming. However, this solution will end up being
better---it's not implemented yet, but we can have a caching layer, such
that the Escaper records a mapping between escaped and unescaped SymbolIds
to avoid work the next time around. If we share the Escaper between _all_
readers and the writer, the result is that
1. Duplicate strings between source files and object files (many of which
are read by both the linker and compiler) avoid re-unescaping; and
2. Writers can use this cache to avoid re-escaping when we've already seen
the escaped variant of the string during read.
The alternative would be a global cache, like the internment system, but I
did not find that to be appropriate here, since this is far less
fundamental and is much easier to compose.
DEV-11081
I'm not fond of this implementation, which is why it's not fully
completed. I wanted to commit this for future reference, and take the
opportunity to explain why I don't like it.
First: this task started as an idea to implement a third variant to
AttrValue and friends that indicates that a value is fixed, in the sense of
a fixed-point function: escaped or unescaped, its value is the same. This
would allow us to skip wasteful escape/unescape operations.
In doing so, it became obvious that there's no need to leak this information
through the API, and indeed, no part of the system should care. When we
read XML, it should be unescaped, and when we write, it should be
escaped. The reason that this didn't quite happen to begin with was an
optimization: I'll be creating an echo writer in place of the current
filesystem-based copy in tamec shortly, and this would allow streaming XIR
directly from the reader to the writer without any unescaping or
re-escaping.
When we unescape, we know the value that it came from, so we could simply
store both symbols---they're 32-bit, so it results in a nicely compressed
64-bit value, so it's essentially cost-free, as long as we accept the
expense of internment. This is `XirString`. Then, when we want to escape
or unescape, we first check to see whether a symbol already exists and, if
so, use it.
While this works well for echoing streams, it won't work all that well in
practice: the unescaped SymbolId will be taken and the XirString discarded,
since nothing after XIR should be coupled with it. Then, when we later
construct a XIR stream for writting, XirString will no longer be available
and our previously known escape is lost, so the writer will have to
re-escape.
Further, if we look at XirString's generic for the XirStringEscaper---it
uses phantom, which hints that maybe it's not in the best place. Indeed,
I've already acknowledged that only a reader unescapes and only a writer
escapes, and that the rest of the system works with normal (unescaped)
values, so only readers and writers should be part of this process. I also
already acknowledged that XirString would be lost and only the unescaped
SymbolId would be used.
So what's the point of XirString, then, if it won't be a useful optimization
beyond the temporary echo writer?
Instead, we can take the XirStringWriter and implement two caches on that:
mapping SymbolId from escaped->unescaped and vice-versa. These can be
simple vectors, since SymbolId is a 32-bit value we will not have much
wasted space for symbols that never get read or written. We could even
optimize for preinterned symbols using markers, though I'll probably not do
so, and I'll explain why later.
If we do _that_, we get even _better_ optimizations through caching that
_will_ apply in the general case (so, not just for echo), and we're able to
ditch XirString entirely and simply use a SymbolId. This makes for a much
more friendly API that isn't leaking implementation details, though it
_does_ put an onus on the caller to pass the encoder to both the reader and
the writer, _if_ it wants to take advantage of a cache. But that burden is
not significant (and is, again, optional if we don't want it).
So, that'll be the next step.
See the previous commit. There is no sense in some common "IR" namespace,
since those IRs should live close to whatever system whose data they
represent.
In the case of these, they are general IRs that can apply to many different
parts of the system. If that proves to be a false statement, they'll be
moved.
DEV-10863
The IRs really ought to live where they are owned, especially given that
"IR" is so generic that it makes no sense for there to be a single location
for them; they're just data structures coupled with different phases of
compilation.
This will be renamed next commit; see that for details.
This also removes some documentation describing the lowering process,
because it's undergone a number of changes and needs to be accurately
re-summarized in another location. That will come at a later time after the
work is further along so that I don't have to keep spending the time
rewriting it.
DEV-10863
This allows AttrList not only to be lazily initialized (which is less of a
problem at the moment with Vec, but may become one in the future), but also
leaves a space open for attributes to be added _after_ having been
parsed. It further leaves room to _take_ attributes from their `Element`.
This is important because the next commit will re-introduce the ability to
parse attributes independently, allowing us to put the parser in a state
where we can parse AttrList without an Element context. To re-use that
parsing under an Element context, we can simply attach an AttrList after it
has been parsed.
Option adds no additional size cost to Vec, so we get this for free (except
for the tiny change that initializes the attribute list when we try to push
to it).
I also think this reads better ("attrs: None"). Though it makes the API
slightly more of a pain to work with.
DEV-10863
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
Tbh, I was unaware that this was supported by tuple variants until reading
over the Rustc source code for something. (Which I had previously read, but
I must have missed it.)
This is more proper, in the sense that in a lot of cases we not only care
about how many values a tuple has, but if we explicitly match on them using
`_`, then any time we modify the number of values, it would _break_ any code
doing so. Using this method, we improve maintainability by not causing
breakages under those circumstances.
But, consequently, it's important that we use this only when we _really_
don't care and don't want to be notified by the compiler.
I did not use `..` as a prefix, even where supported, because the intent is
to append additional information to tuples. Consequently, I also used `..`
in places where no additional fields currently exist, since they may in the
future (e.g. introducing `Span` for `IdentObject`).
In particular, `name` needn't return an `Option`. `fragment` also returns a
copy, since it's just a `SymbolId`. (It really ought to be a newtype rather
than an alias, but we'll worry about that some other time.)
These changes allow us to remove some runtime panics.
DEV-10859
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 the appropriate place to be, now that we've begun narrowing the
types. We'll be able to do so further; this is just the first step.
This does not yet move the tests, but the code is still tested because it's
tightly coupled with `sort`. Those will move in the next commit(s).
DEV-10859
xmle sections will only ever contain an object of one type, so there is no
use in making this generic.
I think the original plan was to have this represent, generically, sections
of some object file (like ELF), but doing so would require a significant
redesign anyway, so it makes no sense. This is easier to reason about.
DEV-10859
This has always been a lowering operation, but it was not phrased in terms
of it, which made the process a bit more confusing to understand.
The implementation hasn't changed, but this is an incremental refactoring
and so exposes BaseAsg and its `graph` field temporarily.
DEV-10859
Sections, as written, are specific to xmle files.
I think the intent originally was to have this be more generic, but that
doesn't really make sense.
By explicitly coupling it with `xmle` files, that will allow us to turn this
into a proper lowering operation with its own validations that will allow
`xmle::xir` to do its job without having to validate anything itself.
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.
The new writer has reached parity of the old, with the exception of some
edge case explicit error handling that should never occur (which will be
added), and cleanup/docs.
Removing this flag now allows me to perform that cleanup without having to
worry about updating the now-old implementation.
I ran `tameld` with the new writer against our production system with
numerous programs and a significant number of test cases, and diff'd the old
and new xmle files, and everything looks good.
`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.
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.
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!
Oh boy. What a mess of a change.
This demonstrates some significant issues we have with Symbol. I had
originally modelled the system a bit after Rustc's, but deviated in certain
regards:
1. This has a confurable base type to enable better packing without bit
twiddling and potentially unsafe tricks I'd rather avoid unless
necessary; and
2. The lifetime is not static, and there is no global, singleton interner;
and
3. I pass around references to a Symbol rather than passing around an
index into an interner.
For #3---this is done because there's no singleton interner and therefore
resolving a symbol requires a direct reference to an available interner. It
also wasn't clear to me (and still isn't, in fact) whether more than one
interner may be used for different contexts.
But, that doesn't preclude removing lifetimes and just passing around
indexes; in fact, I plan to do this in the frontend where the parser and
such will have direct interner access and can therefore just look up based
on a symbol index. We could reserve references for situations where
exposing an interner would be undesirable.
Anyway, more to come...
Mike Gerwitz
Austin Schaffer