Commit Graph

33 Commits (fc569f7551c949c822549f92df07279d54fdcea1)

Author SHA1 Message Date
Mike Gerwitz bc8586e4b3 tamer: xir::autoclose: New lowering operation
This lowering operation is intended to allow me to write a more concise and
clear mapping from the graph to XIRF, without having to worry about
balancing tags, which really complicated the implementation.

This has details docs; see that for more information.

I can't help but be reminded of Wisp (the whitespace-based Lisp-like
syntax).  Which is unfortunate, because I'm not fond of Wisp; I like my
parenthesis.

DEV-13708
2023-03-10 14:27:57 -05:00
Mike Gerwitz 24eecaa3fd tamer: nir: Basic rate block translation
This commit is what I've been sitting on for testing some of the recent
changes; it is a very basic demonstration of lowering all the way down
from source XML files into the ASG.  This can be run on real files to
observe, beyond unit tests, how the system reacts.

Once this outputs data from the graph, we'll finally have tamec end-to-end
and can just keep filling the gaps.

I'm hoping to roll the desugaring process into NirToAir rather than having a
separate process as originally planned a couple of months back.

This also introduces the `wip-nir-to-air` feature flag.  Currently,
interpolation will cause a `Nir::BindIdent` to be emitted in blocks that
aren't yet emitting NIR, and so results in an invalid parse.

DEV-13159
2023-02-01 10:34:15 -05:00
Mike Gerwitz 954b5a2795 Copyright year and name update
Ryan Specialty Group (RSG) rebranded to Ryan Specialty after its IPO.
2023-01-20 23:37:30 -05:00
Mike Gerwitz f9fe4aa13b tamer: xir::st: Static namespace prefixes (c and t)
In particular, `t:*` will be recognized by NIR for short-hand template
application.  These will be utilized in an upcoming commit.

DEV-7145
2022-08-12 00:47:14 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz 8f3301431c tamer: span::dummy: New module to hold DUMMY_SPAN and derivatives
Various DUMMY_SPAN-derived spans are used by many test cases, so this
finally extracts them---something I've been meaning to do for some time.

This also places DUMMY_SPAN behind a `cfg(test)` directive to ensure that it
is _only_ used in tests; UNKNOWN_SPAN should be used when a span is actually
unknown, which may also be the case during development.

DEV-7145
2022-08-01 15:01:37 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz 18803ea576 tamer: xir: Format tokens without tt quotes
Whether or not quoting is appropriate depends on context, and that parent
context is already performing the quoting.  For example:

  error: expected `</rater>`, but found `<import>`
    --> /home/[...]/foo.xml:2:1
     |
   2 | <rater xmlns="http://www.lovullo.com/rater"
     | ------ note: element starts here

    --> /home/[...]/foo.xml:7:3
     |
   7 |   <import package="/rater/core/base" />
     |   ^^^^^^^ error: expected `</rater>`

In these cases (obviously I'm still working on the parser, since this is
nonsense), the parser is responsible for quoting the token "<import>".

DEV-7145
2022-08-01 15:01:37 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz 41b41e02c1 tamer: Xirf::Text refinement
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
2022-08-01 15:01:37 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz e73c223a55 tamer: parser::Parser: cfg(test) tracing
This produces useful parse traces that are output as part of a failing test
case.  The parser generator macros can be a bit confusing to deal with when
things go wrong, so this helps to clarify matters.

This is _not_ intended to be machine-readable, but it does show that it
would be possible to generate machine-readable output to visualize the
entire lowering pipeline.  Perhaps something for the future.

I left these inline in Parser::feed_tok because they help to elucidate what
is going on, just by reading what the trace would output---that is, it helps
to make the method more self-documenting, albeit a tad bit more
verbose.  But with that said, it should probably be extracted at some point;
I don't want this to set a precedent where composition is feasible.

Here's an example from test cases:

  [Parser::feed_tok] (input IR: XIRF)
  |  ==> Parser before tok is parsing attributes for `package`.
  |   |  Attrs_(SutAttrsState_ { ___ctx: (QName(None, LocalPart(NCName(SymbolId(46 "package")))), OpenSpan(Span { len: 0, offset: 0, ctx: Context(SymbolId(1 "#!DUMMY")) }, 10)), ___done: false })
  |
  |  ==> XIRF tok: `<unexpected>`
  |   |  Open(QName(None, LocalPart(NCName(SymbolId(82 "unexpected")))), OpenSpan(Span { len: 0, offset: 1, ctx: Context(SymbolId(1 "#!DUMMY")) }, 10), Depth(1))
  |
  |  ==> Parser after tok is expecting opening tag `<classify>`.
  |   |  ChildA(Expecting_)
  |   |  Lookahead: Some(Lookahead(Open(QName(None, LocalPart(NCName(SymbolId(82 "unexpected")))), OpenSpan(Span { len: 0, offset: 1, ctx: Context(SymbolId(1 "#!DUMMY")) }, 10), Depth(1))))
  = note: this trace was output as a debugging aid because `cfg(test)`.

  [Parser::feed_tok] (input IR: XIRF)
  |  ==> Parser before tok is expecting opening tag `<classify>`.
  |   |  ChildA(Expecting_)
  |
  |  ==> XIRF tok: `<unexpected>`
  |   |  Open(QName(None, LocalPart(NCName(SymbolId(82 "unexpected")))), OpenSpan(Span { len: 0, offset: 1, ctx: Context(SymbolId(1 "#!DUMMY")) }, 10), Depth(1))
  |
  |  ==> Parser after tok is attempting to recover by ignoring element with unexpected name `unexpected` (expected `classify`).
  |   |  ChildA(RecoverEleIgnore_(QName(None, LocalPart(NCName(SymbolId(82 "unexpected")))), OpenSpan(Span { len: 0, offset: 1, ctx: Context(SymbolId(1 "#!DUMMY")) }, 10), Depth(1)))
  |   |  Lookahead: None
  = note: this trace was output as a debugging aid because `cfg(test)`.

DEV-7145
2022-07-19 14:44:18 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz a16a0d9138 Revert "tamer: xir: Initial re-introduction of AttrEnd"
This reverts commit b973d36862.

Alright, I'm getting sick of fighting with myself on this.  But rather than
just removing the last commit, I'm going to keep it around, so that my
thoughts are clearly documented for my future quarrels with myself.

Firstly: this added more overhead than I wanted it to.  While it wasn't
significant, it did add 100--150ms to one of our largest systems, up from
~2.8s, which seems a bit much for a token that's really just meant to make
life easier for the parser.

Further, it seems that all I've managed to do is push my original problem to
a different layer---this started as a means to resolve having to emit both
an object and an error simultaneously in the case where aggregate attribute
parsing has completed, but we encounter an error on the next token (e.g. an
unexpected element).  But XIRF, if it's missing AttrEnd, should throw an
error, but should also recover.  Recovery is easy---just assume that it was
present---_but then we don't emit a XIRF `AttrEnd` token_, which is
necessary for downstream systems.  So we'd need to either:

  (a) emit both a token and an error; or
  (b) panic.

But if we're doing (a), then the need for `AttrEnd` goes away, because it
solves the original problem (though the other concerns of the previous
commit still stand).  (b) is not ideal at all, even though the missing token
does represent an internal system error; it's not something the user can
correct.  But, given that it's something that the user cannot correct,
doesn't that imply that it's an awkward thing to include in the token
stream?  So back to `AttrEnd` being an awkward PITA to have.

So, given (a), I'll just do that: errors will become more of a "hey, this
error just occurred, but I'm trying to recover---here's an object that you
should use if you choose to continue parsing, but it may or may not be what
you're looking for; proceed with caution".  That flips the original script:
I imagined having external systems feed recovery tokens, but this
encapsulates recovery within the parser, which really is more appropriate,
though less flexible than having an omniscient external recovery system;
such a monolith was always an awkward concept and would be difficult to
implement cleanly.

This can also potentially be implemented as a generalization of the Dead
state change that allowed an object to be emitted alongside the
lookahead/error.

Anyway, back to where I was...I'm sure I'll look back on this in the future
shaking my head, reflecting on how naive I was.

DEV-7145
2022-06-29 11:25:44 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz b973d36862 tamer: xir: Initial re-introduction of AttrEnd
AttrEnd was initially removed in
0cc0bc9d5a (and the commit prior), because
there was not a compelling reason to use it over a lookahead
operation (returning a token via the a dead state transition); `AttrEnd`
simply introduced inconsistencies between the XIR reader (which produced
AttrEnd) and internal XIR stream generators (e.g. the lowering operations
into XIR->XML, which do not).

But now that parsers are performing aggregation---in particular the
attribute parser-generator `xir::parse::attr`---this has become quite a
pain, because the dead state is an actionable token.  For example:

  1. Open
  2. Attr
  3. Attr
  4. Open
  5. ...

In the happy case, token #4 results in `Parsed::Incomplete`, and so can just
be transformed into the object representing the aggregated attributes.  But
even in this happy path, it's ugly, and it requires non-tail recursion on
the parser which requires a duplicate stack allocation for the
`ParserState`.  That violates a core principle of the system.

But if there is an error at #4---e.g. an unexpected element---then we no
longer have a `Parsed::Incomplete` to hijack for our own uses, and we'd have
to introduce the ability to return both an error and a token, or we'd have
to introduce the ability to keep a token of lookahead instead of reading
from the underlying token stream, but that's complicated with push parsers,
which are used for parser composition.  Yikes.

And furthermore, the aggregation has caused me to introduce the ability to
override the dead state type to introduce both a token of lookahead and
aggregation information.  This complicates the system and is going to be
confusing to others.

Given all of this, AttrEnd does now seem appropriate to reintroduce, since
it will allow processing of aggregate operations when encountering that
token without having to worry about the above scenario; without having to
duplicate a `ParseState` stack; without having to hijack dead state
transitions for producing our aggregate object; and everything else
mentioned above.

This commit does not modify those abstractions to use AttrEnd yet; it
re-introduces the token to the core system, not the parser-generators, and
it doesn't yet replace lookahead operations in the parsers that use
them.  That'll come next.  Unlike the commit that removed it, though, we are
now generating proper spans, so make note of that here.  This also does not
introduce the concept to XIRF yet, which did not exist at the time that it
was removed, so XIRF is filtering it out until a following commit.

DEV-7145
2022-06-29 11:02:02 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz c671bf6a9c tamer: xir: Introduce {Ele,Open,Close}Span
This isn't conceptally all that significant of a change, but there was a lot
of modify to get it working.  I would generally separate this into a commit
for the implementation and another commit for the integration, but I decided
to keep things together.

This serves a role similar to AttrSpan---this allows deriving a span
representing the element name from a span representing the entire XIR
token.  This will provide more useful context for errors---including the tag
delimiter(s) means that we care about the fact that an element is in that
position (as opposed to some other type of node) within the context of an
error.  However, if we are expecting an element but take issue with the
element name itself, we want to place emphasis on that instead.

This also starts to consider the issue of span contexts---a blob of detached
data that is `Span` is useful for error context, but it's not useful for
manipulation or deriving additional information.  For that, we need to
encode additional context, and this is an attempt at that.

I am interested in the concept of providing Spans that are guaranteed to
actually make sense---that are instantiated and manipulated with APIs that
ensure consistency.  But such a thing buys us very little, practically
speaking, over what I have now for TAMER, and so I don't expect to actually
implement that for this project; I'll leave that for a personal
project.  TAMER's already take a lot of my personal interests and it can
cause me a lot of grief sometimes (with regards to letting my aspirations
cause me more work).

DEV-7145
2022-06-24 14:16:29 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz adc45d90df tamer: xir::parse: Attribute parser generator
This is the first parser generator for the parsing framework.  I've been
waiting quite a while to do this because I wanted to be sure that I
understood how I intended to write the attribute parsers manually.  Now that
I'm about to start parsing source XML files, it is necessary to have a
parser generator.

Typically one thinks of a parser generator as a separate program that
generates code for some language, but that is not always the case---that
represents a lack of expressiveness in the language itself (e.g. C).  Here,
I simply use Rust's macro system, which should be a concept familiar to
someone coming from a language like Lisp.

This also resolves where I stand on parser combinators with respect to this
abstraction: they both accomplish the exact same thing (composition of
smaller parsers), but this abstraction doesn't do so in the typical
functional way.  But the end result is the same.

The parser generated by this abstraction will be optimized an inlined in the
same manner as the hand-written parsers.  Since they'll be tightly coupled
with an element parser (which too will have a parser generator), I expect
that most attribute parsers will simply be inlined; they exist as separate
parsers conceptually, for the same reason that you'd use parser combinators.

It's worth mentioning that this awkward reliance on dead state for a
lookahead token to determine when aggregation is complete rubs me the wrong
way, but resolving it would involve reintroducing the XIR AttrEnd that I had
previously removed.  I'll keep fighting with myself on this, but I want to
get a bit further before I determine if it's worth the tradeoff of
reintroducing (more complex IR but simplified parsing).

DEV-7145
2022-06-21 13:23:02 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz 3f23bc5e33 tamer: fmt: New type-based formatting system
This is partly an experiment, but is designed to simplify producing English
sentences in various contexts.  It makes use of a not only unstable, but
incomplete, Rust feature---adt_const_params, for a static str const type
parameter.  Hopefully that ends up being stabalized.

This uses types, but it's the same as function composition due to Rust's
monomorphization.

DEV-7145
2022-06-10 16:28:15 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz 2b8e7e6031 tamer: xir::st::qname: New module
This moves and deduplicates the static `QName`s into a common area.

DEV-7145
2022-06-06 11:31:27 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz 8d92667388 tamer: Integrate xir::reader as a parser in the lowering pipeline
This allows `XmlXirReader` to be used in a `Lower` operation, just as
everything else, bringing me one step closer to a pipeline that can be
concisely represented; this is finally beginning to unify in a clear way,
though it is still a bit of a mess.

This causes `XmlXirReader` to _act_ like a `parse::Parser` in that it yields
a `ParsedResult`, but it does not use `parse::Parser` itself; that was the
_original_ plan: convert it into a `ParseState` where `XmlXirReader` became
a context, and force `Parser` to yield by feeding it a stream of tokens with
`repeat`, but that ended up performing poorly relative to this change.  I
did some investigation, which I might write about in the future, but for
now, this solution works just fine.

DEV-7145
2022-06-02 10:30:44 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz 1ad2fb1dc8 Copyright year update 2022
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.
2022-05-03 14:14:29 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz 5875477efa tamer: xir::Token: Remove span from Display
This was missed when removing it from other Display impls when the new
diagnostic system was introduced.  Raw `Span`s display byte offsets and the
context, which is no longer desirable as part of an error message.

DEV-10936
2022-05-03 09:09:55 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz eaa8133d21 tamer: diagnose: Introduction of diagnostic system
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
2022-04-13 15:22:46 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz ab181670b5 tamer: xir::reader: Initial introduction of spans
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
2022-04-08 13:59:37 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz ceb00c4df5 tamer: xir: Complete parse type migration
A previous commit moved the parser.  This updates the types so that they can
actually be utilized in that context.

DEV-10863
2022-03-21 15:50:43 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz 14638a612f tamer: {xir::=>}parse: Move parser out of XIR
The parsing framework originally created for XIR is now more general and
useful to other things.  We'll see how this evolves.

This needs additional documentation, but I'd like to see how it changes as
I implement XmloReader and then some of the source readers first.

DEV-10863
2022-03-18 16:24:53 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz 0360226caa tamer: xir::parse: Generalize input token type
This adds a `Token` type to `ParseState`.  Everything uses `xir::Token`
currently, but `XmloReader` will use `xir::flat::Object`.

Now that this has been generalized beyond XIR, the parser ought to be
hoisted up a level.

DEV-10863
2022-03-18 15:26:05 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz 6b8f0663ea tamer: xir::{tree::=>}attr: Move
With the introduction of XIRF, attribute parsing is no longer a XIRT thing.

DEV-10863
2022-03-17 16:10:56 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz 899fa79e59 tamer: xir::flat: Initial XIRF implementation
This introduces XIR Flat (XIRF), which is conceptually between XIR and
XIRT.  This provides a more appropriate level of abstraction for further
lowering operations to parse against, and removes the need for other parsers
to perform their own validations (inappropriately) to ensure well-formed
XML.

There is still some cleanup worth doing, including moving some of the
parsing responsibility up a level back into the XIR parser.

DEV-10863
2022-03-17 13:08:16 -04:00
Mike Gerwitz 5af698d15c tamer: xir::{tree::=>}parse: Move module
It's a bit odd that I've done next to nothing with TAMER for the past week
or so, and decided to do this one small thing before I go on break for the
holidays, but I felt compelled to do _something_.  Besides, this gets me in
a better spot for the inevitable mental planning and writing I'll be doing
over the holidays.

This move was natural, given what this has evolved into---it has nothing to
do with the concept of a "tree", and the modules imports emphasized that
fact given the level of inappropriate nesting.
2021-12-23 13:17:18 -05:00
Mike Gerwitz 0cc0bc9d5a tamer: xir::Token::AttrEnd: Remove
More information can be found in the prior commit message, but I'll
summarize here.

This token was introduced to create a LL(0) parser---no tokens of
lookahead.  This allowed the underlying TokenStream to be freely passed to
the next system that needed it.

Since then, Parser and ParseState were introduced, along with
ParseStatus::Dead, which introduces the concept of lookahead for a single
token---an LL(1) grammar.

I had always suspected that this would happen, given the awkwardness of
AttrEnd; it was just a matter of time before the right abstraction
manifested itself to handle lookahead.

DEV-11339
2021-12-17 10:14:31 -05:00
Mike Gerwitz 325c3167ee tamer: xir::Token::span: New method
This permits retrieving a Span from any Token variant.  To support this,
rather than having this return an Option, Token::AttrEnd was augmented with
a Span; this results in a much simpler and friendlier API.

DEV-11268
2021-12-06 14:48:55 -05:00
Mike Gerwitz 77c18d0615 tamer: xir: Remove Attr::Extensible
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
2021-12-06 14:26:58 -05:00
Mike Gerwitz 5233822322 tamer: xir: Remove Text enum
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
2021-11-15 23:47:14 -05:00
Mike Gerwitz d710437ee4 tamer: xir::escape::CachingEscaper: New Escaper
As promised, this will cache previously seen escaped/unescaped values by
creating a two-way mapping between them.

DEV-11081
2021-11-15 16:44:24 -05:00
Mike Gerwitz 27ba03b59b tamer: xir::escape: Remove XirString in favor of Escaper
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
2021-11-12 14:03:23 -05:00
Mike Gerwitz b1c0783c75 tamer: xir::XirString: WIP implementation (likely going away)
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.
2021-11-10 12:22:10 -05:00
Mike Gerwitz 428d508be4 tamer: {ir::=>}{asg, xir}
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
2021-11-04 16:13:27 -04:00