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* 3381Kartik K. Agaram2016-09-171-1/+1
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* 3380Kartik K. Agaram2016-09-171-14/+14
| | | | | One more place we were missing expanding type abbreviations: inside container definitions.
* 3309Kartik K. Agaram2016-09-091-3/+5
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 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.
* 3273Kartik K. Agaram2016-08-281-1/+1
| | | | | | | | | | | Undo 3272. The trouble with creating a new section for constants is that there's no good place to order it since constants can be initialized using globals as well as vice versa. And I don't want to add constraints disallowing either side. Instead, a new plan: always declare constants in the Globals section using 'extern const' rather than just 'const', since otherwise constants implicitly have internal linkage (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14894698/why-does-extern-const-int-n-not-work-as-expected)
* 3260Kartik K. Agaram2016-08-261-5/+5
| | | | | array length = number of elements array size = in locations
* 3259Kartik K. Agaram2016-08-261-2/+2
| | | | | | | | | | | Prefer preincrement operators wherever possible. Old versions of compilers used to be better at optimizing them. Even if we don't care about performance it's useful to make unary operators look like unary operators wherever possible, and to distinguish the 'statement form' which doesn't care about the value of the expression from the postincrement which usually increments as a side-effect in some larger computation (and so is worth avoiding except for some common idioms, or perhaps even there).
* 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?
* 3071Kartik K. Agaram2016-06-281-3/+0
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* 3070Kartik K. Agaram2016-06-281-9/+14
| | | | | Extract out the implementation of 'allocate' so other instructions (ahem, deep-copy) can use it.
* 2990Kartik K. Agaram2016-05-201-4/+4
| | | | | | | | | | 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..
* 2971Kartik K. Agaram2016-05-171-2/+13
| | | | | | Long-overdue reorganization to support general 'dilated' reagents up front. This also allows me to move tests that are really about unrelated layers out of layers dealing with parsing.
* 2931 - be explicit about making copiesKartik K. Agaram2016-05-061-4/+4
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* 2894Kartik K. Agaram2016-05-031-689/+20
| | | | | Reorganize the 'address' layer and split it up before we start greatly expanding them to manage refcounts in nested objects.
* 2893Kartik K. Agaram2016-05-031-0/+1032