For frameworks it's important that structures are as lazy as possible
to prevent infinite recursions, performance issues and errors that
aren't related to the thing to evaluate. As a consequence, they have
to emit more attributes than strictly (sic) necessary.
However, these attributes with empty values are not useful to the user
so we omit them.
Prior to this change, we had a bunch of ad-hoc string manipulation code
scattered around. This made it hard to figure out what data model for
string contexts is.
Now, we still store string contexts most of the time as encoded strings
--- I was wary of the performance implications of changing that --- but
whenever we parse them we do so only through the
`NixStringContextElem::parse` method, which handles all cases. This
creates a data type that is very similar to `DerivedPath` but:
- Represents the funky `=<drvpath>` case as properly distinct from the
others.
- Only encodes a single output, no wildcards and no set, for the
"built" case.
(I would like to deprecate `=<path>`, after which we are in spitting
distance of `DerivedPath` and could maybe get away with fewer types, but
that is another topic for another day.)
Allow `nix build flake1 flake2 --update-input <Tab>` to complete the
inputs of both flakes.
Also do tilde expansion so that `nix build ~/flake --update-input <Tab>`
works.
'nix profile install' will now install all outputs listed in the
package's meta.outputsToInstall attribute, or all outputs if that
attribute doesn't exist. This makes it behave consistently with
nix-env. Fixes#6385.
Furthermore, for consistency, all other 'nix' commands do this as
well. E.g. 'nix build' will build and symlink the outputs in
meta.outputsToInstall, defaulting to all outputs. Previously, it only
built/symlinked the first output. Note that this means that selecting
a specific output using attrpath selection (e.g. 'nix build
nixpkgs#libxml2.dev') no longer works. A subsequent PR will add a way
to specify the desired outputs explicitly.
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!)
Pos objects are somewhat wasteful as they duplicate the origin file name and
input type for each object. on files that produce more than one Pos when parsed
this a sizeable waste of memory (one pointer per Pos). the same goes for
ptr<Pos> on 64 bit machines: parsing enough source to require 8 bytes to locate
a position would need at least 8GB of input and 64GB of expression memory. it's
not likely that we'll hit that any time soon, so we can use a uint32_t index to
locate positions instead.
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.
Robert Hensing
Yorick