after #6218 `Symbol` no longer confers a uniqueness invariant on the
string it wraps, it is now possible to create multiple symbols that
compare equal but whose string contents have different addresses. this
guarantee is now only provided by `SymbolIdx`, leaving `Symbol` only as
a string wrapper that knows about the intricacies of how symbols need to
be formatted for output.
this change renames `SymbolIdx` to `Symbol` to restore the previous
semantics of `Symbol` to that name. we also keep the wrapper type and
rename it to `SymbolStr` instead of returning plain strings from lookups
into the symbol table because symbols are formatted for output in many
places. theoretically we do not need `SymbolStr`, only a function that
formats a string for output as a symbol, but having to wrap every symbol
that appears in a message into eg `formatSymbol()` is error-prone and
inconvient.
this slightly increases the amount of memory used for any given symbol, but this
increase is more than made up for if the symbol is referenced more than once in
the EvalState that holds it. on average every symbol should be referenced at
least twice (once to introduce a binding, once to use it), so we expect no
increase in memory on average.
symbol tables are limited to 2³² entries like position tables, and similar
arguments apply to why overflow is not likely: 2³² symbols would require as many
string instances (at 24 bytes each) and map entries (at 24 bytes or more each,
assuming that the map holds on average at most one item per bucket as the docs
say). a full symbol table would require at least 192GB of memory just for
symbols, which is well out of reach. (an ofborg eval of nixpks today creates
less than a million symbols!)
In particular, this means that 'nix eval` (which uses toValue()) no
longer auto-calls functions or functors (because
AttrCursor::findAlongAttrPath() doesn't).
Fixes#6152.
Also use ref<> in a few places, and don't return attrpaths from
getCursor() because cursors already have a getAttrPath() method.
No real need for keeping a separate header for such a simple class.
This requires changing a bit `OrSuggestions<T>::operator*` to not throw
an `Error` to prevent a cyclic dependency. But since this error is only
thrown on programmer error, we can replace the whole method by a direct
call to `std::get` which will raise its own assertion if needs be.
I think that it's not very helpful to get "cached failures" in a wrong
`flake.nix`. This can be very confusing when debugging a Nix expression.
See for instance NixOS/nixpkgs#118115.
In fact, the eval cache allows a forced reevaluation which is used for
e.g. `nix eval`.
This change makes sure that this is the case for `nix build` as well. So
rather than
λ ma27 [~/Projects/exp] → ../nix/outputs/out/bin/nix build -L --rebuild --experimental-features 'nix-command flakes'
error: cached failure of attribute 'defaultPackage.x86_64-linux'
the evaluation of already-evaluated (and failed) attributes looks like
this now:
λ ma27 [~/Projects/exp] → ../nix/outputs/out/bin/nix build -L --rebuild --experimental-features 'nix-command flakes'
error: attribute 'hell' missing
at /nix/store/mrnvi9ss8zn5wj6gpn4bcd68vbh42mfh-source/flake.nix:6:35:
5|
6| packages.x86_64-linux.hello = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.hell;
| ^
7|
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)
Fixes#3872.
This is a bit hacky. Ideally we would automatically re-evaluate the
failed attribute iff we need to print the error message (so in
commands like 'nix search' we wouldn't re-evaluate because we're
suppressing errors).
Maximilian Bosch