**`Value` and `const`**
These two deserve some explanation. We'll get to lists later.
Values can normally be thought of as immutable, except they are
are also the vehicle for call by need, which must be implemented
using mutation.
This circumstance makes a `const Value` a rather useless thing:
- If it's a thunk, you can't evaluate it, except by copying, but
that would not be call by need.
- If it's not a thunk, you know the type, so the method that
acquired it for you should have returned something more specific,
such as a `const Bindings &` (which actually does make sense
because that's an immutable span of pointers to mutable `Value`s.
- If you don't care about the type yet, you might establish the
convention that `const Value` means `deepSeq`-ed data, but
this is hardly useful and not actually as safe as you would
supposedly want to trust it to be - just convention.
**Lists**
`std::span` is a tuple of pointer and size - just what we need.
We don't return them as `const Value`, because considering the
first bullet point we discussed before, we'd have to force all
the list values, which isn't what we want.
So what we end up with is a nice representation of a list in
weak head normal form: the spine is immutable, but the
items may need some evaluation later.
Closes#9343
See that issue for motivation.
Installing these is disabled by default, but we enable it (and the
additional output we want isntall these too so as not to clutter the
existing ones) to use in cross builds and dev shells.
Try to stay away from stack overflows.
These small vectors use stack space. Most instances will not need
to allocate because in general most things are small, and large
things are worth heap allocating.
16 * 3 * word = 384 bytes is still quite a bit, but these functions
tend not to be part of deep recursions.
This makes stack usage significantly more compact, allowing larger
amounts of data to be processed on the same stack.
PrimOp functions with more than 8 positional (curried) arguments
should use an attrset instead.
VLAs are a dangerous feature, and their usage triggers an undefined
behavior since theire size can be zero in some cases.
So replace them with `boost::small_vector`s which fit the same goal but
are safer.
It's also incidentally consistently 1% faster on the benchmarks.
nix-repl> bools = [ false true ]
nix-repl> combinations = builtins.concatMap (a: builtins.concatMap (b: map (c: { inherit a b c; }) bools) bools) bools
nix-repl> builtins.all ({ a, b, c }: (a -> b -> c) == (a -> (b -> c))) combinations
true
nix-repl> builtins.all ({ a, b, c }: (a -> b -> c) == ((a -> b) -> c)) combinations
false
Robert Hensing