about summary refs log tree commit diff stats
path: root/027call_ingredient.cc
Commit message (Collapse)AuthorAgeFilesLines
* 3663 - fix a refcounting bug: '(type)' != 'type'Kartik K. Agaram2016-11-101-2/+3
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | This was a large commit, and most of it is a follow-up to commit 3309, undoing what is probably the final ill-considered optimization I added to s-expressions in Mu: I was always representing (a b c) as (a b . c), etc. That is now gone. Why did I need to take it out? The key problem was the error silently ignored in layer 30. That was causing size_of("(type)") to silently return garbage rather than loudly complain (assuming 'type' was a simple type). But to take it out I had to modify types_strictly_match (layer 21) to actually strictly match and not just do a prefix match. In the process of removing the prefix match, I had to make extracting recipe types from recipe headers more robust. So far it only matched the first element of each ingredient's type; these matched: (recipe address:number -> address:number) (recipe address -> address) I didn't notice because the dotted notation optimization was actually representing this as: (recipe address:number -> address number) --- One final little thing in this commit: I added an alias for 'assert' called 'assert_for_now', to indicate that I'm not sure something's really an invariant, that it might be triggered by (invalid) user programs, and so require more thought on error handling down the road. But this may well be an ill-posed distinction. It may be overwhelmingly uneconomic to continually distinguish between model invariants and error states for input. I'm starting to grow sympathetic to Google Analytics's recent approach of just banning assertions altogether. We'll see..
* 3541Kartik K. Agaram2016-10-211-3/+1
|
* 3522Kartik K. Agaram2016-10-191-2/+2
|
* 3381Kartik K. Agaram2016-09-171-3/+3
|
* 3380Kartik K. Agaram2016-09-171-9/+9
| | | | | One more place we were missing expanding type abbreviations: inside container definitions.
* 3374Kartik K. Agaram2016-09-161-4/+4
|
* 3309Kartik K. Agaram2016-09-091-6/+10
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Rip out everything to fix one failing unit test (commit 3290; type abbreviations). This commit does several things at once that I couldn't come up with a clean way to unpack: A. It moves to a new representation for type trees without changing the actual definition of the `type_tree` struct. B. It adds unit tests for our type metadata precomputation, so that errors there show up early and in a simpler setting rather than dying when we try to load Mu code. C. It fixes a bug, guarding against infinite loops when precomputing metadata for recursive shape-shifting containers. To do this it uses a dumb way of comparing type_trees, comparing their string representations instead. That is likely incredibly inefficient. Perhaps due to C, this commit has made Mu incredibly slow. Running all tests for the core and the edit/ app now takes 6.5 minutes rather than 3.5 minutes. == more notes and details I've been struggling for the past week now to back out of a bad design decision, a premature optimization from the early days: storing atoms directly in the 'value' slot of a cons cell rather than creating a special 'atom' cons cell and storing it on the 'left' slot. In other words, if a cons cell looks like this: o / | \ left val right ..then the type_tree (a b c) used to look like this (before this commit): o | \ a o | \ b o | \ c null ..rather than like this 'classic' approach to s-expressions which never mixes val and right (which is what we now have): o / \ o o | / \ a o o | / \ b o null | c The old approach made several operations more complicated, most recently the act of replacing a (possibly atom/leaf) sub-tree with another. That was the final straw that got me to realize the contortions I was going through to save a few type_tree nodes (cons cells). Switching to the new approach was hard partly because I've been using the old approach for so long and type_tree manipulations had pervaded everything. Another issue I ran into was the realization that my layers were not cleanly separated. Key parts of early layers (precomputing type metadata) existed purely for far later ones (shape-shifting types). Layers I got repeatedly stuck at: 1. the transform for precomputing type sizes (layer 30) 2. type-checks on merge instructions (layer 31) 3. the transform for precomputing address offsets in types (layer 36) 4. replace operations in supporting shape-shifting recipes (layer 55) After much thrashing I finally noticed that it wasn't the entirety of these layers that was giving me trouble, but just the type metadata precomputation, which had bugs that weren't manifesting until 30 layers later. Or, worse, when loading .mu files before any tests had had a chance to run. A common failure mode was running into types at run time that I hadn't precomputed metadata for at transform time. Digging into these bugs got me to realize that what I had before wasn't really very good, but a half-assed heuristic approach that did a whole lot of extra work precomputing metadata for utterly meaningless types like `((address number) 3)` which just happened to be part of a larger type like `(array (address number) 3)`. So, I redid it all. I switched the representation of types (because the old representation made unit tests difficult to retrofit) and added unit tests to the metadata precomputation. I also made layer 30 only do the minimal metadata precomputation it needs for the concepts introduced until then. In the process, I also made the precomputation more correct than before, and added hooks in the right place so that I could augment the logic when I introduced shape-shifting containers. == lessons learned There's several levels of hygiene when it comes to layers: 1. Every layer introduces precisely what it needs and in the simplest way possible. If I was building an app until just that layer, nothing would seem over-engineered. 2. Some layers are fore-shadowing features in future layers. Sometimes this is ok. For example, layer 10 foreshadows containers and arrays and so on without actually supporting them. That is a net win because it lets me lay out the core of Mu's data structures out in one place. But if the fore-shadowing gets too complex things get nasty. Not least because it can be hard to write unit tests for features before you provide the plumbing to visualize and manipulate them. 3. A layer is introducing features that are tested only in later layers. 4. A layer is introducing features with tests that are invalidated in later layers. (This I knew from early on to be an obviously horrendous idea.) Summary: avoid Level 2 (foreshadowing layers) as much as possible. Tolerate it indefinitely for small things where the code stays simple over time, but become strict again when things start to get more complex. Level 3 is mostly a net lose, but sometimes it can be expedient (a real case of the usually grossly over-applied term "technical debt"), and it's better than the conventional baseline of no layers and no scenarios. Just clean it up as soon as possible. Definitely avoid layer 4 at any time. == minor lessons Avoid unit tests for trivial things, write scenarios in context as much as possible. But within those margins unit tests are fine. Just introduce them before any scenarios (commit 3297). Reorganizing layers can be easy. Just merge layers for starters! Punt on resplitting them in some new way until you've gotten them to work. This is the wisdom of Refactoring: small steps. What made it hard was not wanting to merge *everything* between layer 30 and 55. The eventual insight was realizing I just need to move those two full-strength transforms and nothing else.
* 3202 - bugfix: 'start-running' and refcountsKartik K. Agaram2016-08-161-0/+1
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | When you pass an ingredient to a recipe using 'start-running' it mostly behaves identically to performing a regular function call. However, if the calling function completed before the new routine had a chance to run, the ingredients passed in ran the risk of being reclaimed. In response, let's always increment refcounts at the time of a function call rather than when the ingredients are read inside the callee. Now the summary of commit 3197 is modified to this: Update refcounts of products after every instruction, EXCEPT: a) when instruction is a non-primitive and the callee starts with 'local-scope' (because it's already not decremented in 'return') OR: b) when instruction is primitive 'next-ingredient' or 'next-ingredient-without-typechecking'
* 3120Kartik K. Agaram2016-07-211-2/+2
| | | | | | | | Always show instruction before any transforms in error messages. This is likely going to make some errors unclear because they *need* to show the original instruction. But if we don't have tests for those situations did they ever really work?
* 3079Kartik K. Agaram2016-06-291-1/+1
|
* 3074Kartik K. Agaram2016-06-291-1/+2
| | | | Thanks Ella Couch for finding this bug.
* 2990Kartik K. Agaram2016-05-201-5/+5
| | | | | | | | | | Standardize quotes around reagents in error messages. I'm still sure there's issues. For example, the messages when type-checking 'copy'. I'm not putting quotes around them because in layer 60 I end up creating dilated reagents, and then it's a bit much to have quotes and (two kinds of) brackets. But I'm sure I'm doing that somewhere..
* 2931 - be explicit about making copiesKartik K. Agaram2016-05-061-2/+2
|
* 2864 - replace all address:shared with just addressKartik K. Agaram2016-04-241-5/+3
| | | | | | | Now that we no longer have non-shared addresses, we can just always track refcounts for all addresses. Phew!
* 2862Kartik K. Agaram2016-04-241-0/+185
Layers 0-29 are now a complete rudimentary platform except for pointers and indirection.