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.
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.
Some tools which consume the "nix print-dev-env" rc script (such as
"nix-direnv") are sensitive to the use of unbound variables. They use
"set -u".
The "nix print-dev-env" rc script initially unsets "shellHook", then
loads variables from the derivation, and then evaluates "shellHook".
However, most derivations don't have a "shellHook" attribute.
So users get the error "shellHook: unbound variable". This can be
demonstrated with the command:
nix print-dev-env nixpkgs#hello | bash -u
This commit changes the rc script to provide an empty fallback value
for the "shellHook" variable.
Closes: #7951#8253
While preparing PRs like #9753, I've had to change error messages in
dozens of code paths. It would be nice if instead of
EvalError("expected 'boolean' but found '%1%'", showType(v))
we could write
TypeError(v, "boolean")
or similar. Then, changing the error message could be a mechanical
refactor with the compiler pointing out places the constructor needs to
be changed, rather than the error-prone process of grepping through the
codebase. Structured errors would also help prevent the "same" error
from having multiple slightly different messages, and could be a first
step towards error codes / an error index.
This PR reworks the exception infrastructure in `libexpr` to
support exception types with different constructor signatures than
`BaseError`. Actually refactoring the exceptions to use structured data
will come in a future PR (this one is big enough already, as it has to
touch every exception in `libexpr`).
The core design is in `eval-error.hh`. Generally, errors like this:
state.error("'%s' is not a string", getAttrPathStr())
.debugThrow<TypeError>()
are transformed like this:
state.error<TypeError>("'%s' is not a string", getAttrPathStr())
.debugThrow()
The type annotation has moved from `ErrorBuilder::debugThrow` to
`EvalState::error`.
As discussed in the maintainer meeting on 2024-01-29.
Mainly this is to avoid a situation where the name is parsed and
treated as a file name, mostly to protect users.
.-* and ..-* are also considered invalid because they might strip
on that separator to remove versions. Doesn't really work, but that's
what we decided, and I won't argue with it, because .-* probably
doesn't seem to have a real world application anyway.
We do still permit a 1-character name that's just "-", which still
poses a similar risk in such a situation. We can't start disallowing
trailing -, because a non-zero number of users will need it and we've
seen how annoying and painful such a change is.
What matters most is preventing a situation where . or .. can be
injected, and to just get this done.
Use `diff --color=always` to print colored output for language test
failures. I've also flipped the arguments so that expected lines missing
from the actual output will be marked with a red `-` and additional
lines found in the actual output will be marked with a green `+`.
Previously it was the other way around, which was very confusing.
This extends the `error: cannot coerce a TYPE to a string` message
to print the value that could not be coerced. This helps with debugging
by making it easier to track down where the value is being produced
from, especially in errors with deep or unhelpful stack traces.
More invariants are enforced in the type, and less state needs to be
stored in the main sink itself. The method here is roughly that known as
"session types".
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
Low-hanging fruit in the spirit of #9753 and #9754 (means 9999years did
all the hard work already).
This basically prints out what was attempted to be called as function,
i.e.
map (import <nixpkgs> {}) [ 1 2 3 ]
now gives the following error message:
error:
… while calling the 'map' builtin
at «string»:1:1:
1| map (import <nixpkgs> {}) [ 1 2 3 ]
| ^
… while evaluating the first argument passed to builtins.map
error: expected a function but found a set: { _type = "pkgs"; AAAAAASomeThingsFailToEvaluate = «thunk»; AMB-plugins = «thunk»; ArchiSteamFarm = «thunk»; BeatSaberModManager = «thunk»; CHOWTapeModel = «thunk»; ChowCentaur = «thunk»; ChowKick = «thunk»; ChowPhaser = «thunk»; CoinMP = «thunk»; «18783 attributes elided»}
Rebecca Turner
Robert Hensing
Maximilian Bosch