Mike Gerwitz
42b5007402
The XIRT parser was initially written for test cases, so that unit tests
should assert more easily on generated token streams (XIR). While it was
planned, it wasn't clear what the eventual needs would be, which were
expected to differ. Indeed, loading everything into a generic tree
representation in memory is not appropriate---we should prefer streaming and
avoiding heap allocations when they’re not necessary, and we should parse
into an IR rather than a generic format, which ensures that the data follow
a proper grammar and are semantically valid.
When parsing attributes in an isolated context became necessary for the
aforementioned task, the state machine of the XIRT parser was modified to
accommodate. The opposite approach should have been taken---instead of
adding complexity and special cases to the parser, and from a complex parser
extracting a simple one (an attribute parser), we should be composing the
larger (full XIRT) parser from smaller ones (e.g. attribute, child
elements).
A combinator, when used in a functional sense, refers not to combinatory
logic but to the composition of more complex systems from smaller ones. The
changes made as part of this commit begin to work toward combinators, though
it's not necessarily evident yet (to you, the reader) how that'll work,
since the code for it hasn't yet been written; this is commit is simply
getting my work thusfar introduced so I can do some light refactoring before
continuing on it.
TAMER does not aim to introduce a parser combinator framework in its usual
sense---it favors, instead, striking a proper balance with Rust’s type
system that permits the convenience of combinators only in situations where
they are needed, to avoid having to write new parser
boilerplate. Specifically:
1. Rust’s type system should be used as combinators, so that parsers are
automatically constructed from the type definition.
2. Primitive parsers are written as explicit automata, not as primitive
combinators.
3. Parsing should directly produce IRs as a lowering operation below XIRT,
rather than producing XIRT itself. That is, target IRs should consume
XIRT and produce parse themselves immediately, during streaming.
In the future, if more combinators are needed, they will be added; maybe
this will eventually evolve into a more generic parser combinator framework
for TAME, but that is certainly a waste of time right now. And, to be
honest, I’m hoping that won’t be necessary.
|
||
|---|---|---|
| .. | ||
| benches | ||
| build-aux | ||
| src | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| Cargo.lock | ||
| Cargo.toml | ||
| Makefile.am | ||
| README.md | ||
| autogen.sh | ||
| bootstrap | ||
| configure.ac | ||
| rustfmt.toml | ||
README.md
TAME in Rust (TAMER)
TAME was written to help tame the complexity of developing comparative insurance rating systems. This project aims to tame the complexity and performance issues of TAME itself. TAMER is therefore more tame than TAME.
TAME was originally written in XSLT. For more information about the
project, see the parent README.md.
Building
To bootstrap from the source repository, run ./bootstrap.
To configure the build for your system, run ./configure. To build, run
make. To run tests, run make check.
You may also invoke cargo directly, which make will do for you using
options provided to configure.
Note that the default development build results in terrible runtime performance! See [#Build Flags][] below for instructions on how to generate a release binary.
Build Flags
The environment variable CARGO_BUILD_FLAGS can be used to provide
additional arguments to cargo build when invoked via make. This can be
provided optionally during configure and can be overridden when invoking
make. For example:
# release build
$ ./configure && make CARGO_BUILD_FLAGS=--release
$ ./configure CARGO_BUILD_FLAGS=--release && make
# dev build
$ ./configure && make
$ ./configure CARGO_BUILD_FLAGS=--release && make CARGO_BUILD_FLAGS=
Hacking
This section contains advice for those developing TAMER.
Running Tests
Developers should be using test-driven development (TDD). make check will
run all necessary tests.
Code Format
Rust provides rustfmt that can automatically format code for you. This
project mandates its use and therefore eliminates personal preference in
code style (for better or worse).
Formatting checks are run during make check and, on failure, will output
the diff that would be applied if you ran make fmt (or make fix); this
will run cargo fmt for you (and will use the binaries configured via
configure).
Since developers should be doing test-driven development (TDD) and therefore
should be running make check frequently, the hope is that frequent
feedback on formatting issues will allow developers to quickly adjust their
habits to avoid triggering formatting errors at all.
If you want to automatically fix formatting errors and then run tests:
$ make fmt check
Benchmarking
Benchmarks serve two purposes: external integration tests (which are subject
to module visibility constraints) and actual benchmarking. To run
benchmarks, invoke make bench.
Note that link-time optimizations (LTO) are performed on the binary for benchmarking so that its performance reflects release builds that will be used in production.
The configure script will automatically detect whether the test feature
is unstable (as it was as of the time of writing) and, if so, will
automatically fall back to invoking nightly (by running cargo +nightly bench).
If you do not have nightly, run you install it via rustup install nightly.