this gives about 20% performance improvements on pure parsing. obviously
it'll be less on full eval, but depending on how much parsing has to be
done (eg whether nixpkgs haskell modules are included or not) it ranges
anywhere from 4% to 10% in our tests.
this has been tested with thousands of core hours of fuzz testing to
ensure that the ASTs produced by the new parser are exactly the same as
the ones produced by the old parser. error messages will
change (sometimes a lot) and are currently not perfect, but we'd rather
leave that open for improvement than having this work rot forever.
almost all places where Exprs are passed as pointers expect the pointers
to be non-null. pass them as references instead to encode this
constraint in types.
now that destructors are hooked up we want to give the C skeleton a
chance to actually run them. since bison does not call destructors on
values that have been passed to semantic actions even when the action
causes an abort we will also have to do some manual deleting.
partially reverts e8d9de967f.
we now keep not a table of all positions, but a table of all origins and
their sizes. position indices are now direct pointers into the virtual
concatenation of all parsed contents. this slightly reduces memory usage
and time spent in the parser, at the cost of not being able to report
positions if the total input size exceeds 4GiB. this limit is not unique
to nix though, rustc and clang also limit their input to 4GiB (although
at least clang refuses to process inputs that are larger, we will not).
this new 4GiB limit probably will not cause any problems for quite a
while, all of nixpkgs together is less than 100MiB in size and already
needs over 700MiB of memory and multiple seconds just to parse. 4GiB
worth of input will easily take multiple minutes and over 30GiB of
memory without even evaluating anything. if problems *do* arise we can
probably recover the old table-based system by adding some tracking to
Pos::Origin (or increasing the size of PosIdx outright), but for time
being this looks like more complexity than it's worth.
since we now need to read the entire input again to determine the
line/column of a position we'll make unsafeGetAttrPos slightly lazy:
mostly the set it returns is only used to determine the file of origin
of an attribute, not its exact location. the thunks do not add
measurable runtime overhead.
notably this change is necessary to allow changing the parser since
apparently nothing supports nix's very idiosyncratic line ending choice
of "anything goes", making it very hard to calculate line/column
positions in the parser (while byte offsets are very easy).
this needs a string comparison because there seems to be no other way to
get that information out of bison. usually the location info is going to
be correct (pointing at a bad token), but since EOF isn't a token as
such it'll be wrong in that this case.
this hasn't shown up much so far because a single line ending *is* a
token, so any file formatted in the usual manner (ie, ending in a line
ending) would have its EOF position reported correctly.
the parser treats a plain \r as a newline, error reports do not. this
can lead to interesting divergences if anything makes use of this
feature, with error reports pointing to wrong locations in the input (or
even outside the input altogether).
previously we reported the error at the beginning of the binding
block (for plain inherits) or the beginning of the attr list (for
inherit-from), effectively hiding where exactly the error happened.
this also carries over to runtime positions of attributes in sets as
reported by unsafeGetAttrPos. we're not worried about this changing
observable eval behavior because it *is* marked unsafe, and the new
behavior is much more useful.
we already normalize attr order to lexicographic, doing the same for
formals makes sense. doubly so because the order of formals would
otherwise depend on the context of the expression, which is not quite as
useful as one might expect.
the parser modifies its inputs, which means that sharing them between
the error context reporting system and the parser itself can confuse the
reporting system. usually this led to early truncation of error context
reports which, while not dangerous, can be quite confusing.
desugaring inherit-from to syntactic duplication of the source expr also
duplicates side effects of the source expr (such as trace calls) and
expensive computations (such as derivationStrict).
for plain inherits this is really just a stylistic choice, but for
inherit-from it actually fixes an exponential size increase problem
during expr printing (as may happen during assertion failure reporting,
on during duplicate attr detection in the parser)
this also has the effect of sorting let bindings lexicographically
rather than by symbol creation order as was previously done, giving a
better canonicalization in the process.
how the different invocations relate to each other seems be
confusing, which is relatable because one has to wire it up in your head
while reading. an explicit reference should make it unambiguous and
easier to notice due to links being highlighted.
autoconf authors apparently decided that setting `-O2` by default was a good idea. I disagree, and Nix has its own way of deciding that (with `OPTIMIZE={0,1}`). Explicitly set `CFLAGS` and `CXXFLAGS` in the configure script to disable that behaviour.
Fix#9965
When I started contributing to Nix, I found the mix of definitions and
names in `fmt.hh` to be rather confusing, especially the small
difference between `hintfmt` and `hintformat`. I've renamed many classes
and added documentation to most definitions.
- `formatHelper` is no longer exported.
- `fmt`'s documentation is now with `fmt` rather than (misleadingly)
above `formatHelper`.
- `yellowtxt` is renamed to `Magenta`.
`yellowtxt` wraps its value with `ANSI_WARNING`, but `ANSI_WARNING`
has been equal to `ANSI_MAGENTA` for a long time. Now the name is
updated.
- `normaltxt` is renamed to `Uncolored`.
- `hintfmt` has been merged into `hintformat` as extra constructor
functions.
- `hintformat` has been renamed to `hintfmt`.
- The single-argument `hintformat(std::string)` constructor has been
renamed to a static member `hintformat::interpolate` to avoid pitfalls
with using user-generated strings as format strings.
Rebecca Turner