| Commit message (Collapse) | Author | Age | Files | Lines |
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I've been saying for a while[1][2][3] that adding extra abstractions makes
things harder for newcomers, and adding new notations doubly so. And then
I notice this DSL in my own backyard. Makes me feel like a hypocrite.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13565743#13570092
[2] https://lobste.rs/s/to8wpr/configuration_files_are_canary_warning
[3] https://lobste.rs/s/mdmcdi/little_languages_by_jon_bentley_1986#c_3miuf2
The implementation of the DSL was also highly hacky:
a) It was happening in the tangle/ tool, but was utterly unrelated to tangling
layers.
b) There were several persnickety constraints on the different kinds of
lines and the specific order they were expected in. I kept finding bugs
where the translator would silently do the wrong thing. Or the error messages
sucked, and readers may be stuck looking at the generated code to figure
out what happened. Fixing error messages would require a lot more code,
which is one of my arguments against DSLs in the first place: they may
be easy to implement, but they're hard to design to go with the grain of
the underlying platform. They require lots of iteration. Is that effort
worth prioritizing in this project?
On the other hand, the DSL did make at least some readers' life easier,
the ones who weren't immediately put off by having to learn a strange syntax.
There were fewer quotes to parse, fewer backslash escapes.
Anyway, since there are also people who dislike having to put up with strange
syntaxes, we'll call that consideration a wash and tear this DSL out.
---
This commit was sheer drudgery. Hopefully it won't need to be redone with
a new DSL because I grow sick of backslashes.
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I've extracted it into a separate binary, independent of my Mu prototype.
I also cleaned up my tracing layer to be a little nicer. Major improvements:
- Realized that incremental tracing really ought to be the default.
And to minimize printing traces to screen.
- Finally figured out how to combine layers and call stack frames in a
single dimension of depth. The answer: optimize for the experience of
`browse_trace`. Instructions occupy a range of depths based on their call
stack frame, and minor details of an instruction lie one level deeper
in each case.
Other than that, I spent some time adjusting levels everywhere to make
`browse_trace` useful.
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So far we only checked if a single recipe used a variable with multiple
types in any single space. Now we also ensure that the types deduced for
a variable in a space are identical across recipes.
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This has taken me almost 6 weeks :(
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I've been working on this slowly over several weeks, but it's too hard
to support 0 as the null value for addresses. I constantly have to add
exceptions for scalar value corresponding to an address type (now
occupying 2 locations). The final straw is the test for 'reload':
x:num <- reload text
'reload' returns an address. But there's no way to know that for
arbitrary instructions.
New plan: let's put this off for a bit and first create support for
literals. Then use 'null' instead of '0' for addresses everywhere. Then
it'll be easy to just change what 'null' means.
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I have a plan for a way to avoid use-after-free errors without all the
overheads of maintaining refcounts. Has the nice side-effect of
requiring manual memory management. The Mu way is to leak memory by
default and build tools to help decide when and where to expend effort
plugging memory leaks. Arguably programs should be distributed with
summaries of their resource use characteristics.
Eliminating refcount maintenance reduces time to run tests by 30% for
`mu edit`:
this commit parent
mu test: 3.9s 4.5s
mu test edit: 2:38 3:48
Open questions:
- making reclamation easier; some sort of support for destructors
- reclaiming local scopes (which are allocated on the heap)
- should we support automatically reclaiming allocations inside them?
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Stop hardcoding Max_depth everywhere; we had a default value for a
reason but then we forgot all about it.
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Generalize commit 4089 to arbitrary closures, and not just the current
'space' or call frame. Now we should be treating spaces just like any
other data structure, and reclaiming all addresses inside them when we
need to.
The cost: all spaces must now specify what recipe generated them (so
they know how to interpret the array of locations) using the /names
property.
We can probably make this ergonomic with a little 'type inference'. But
at least things are safe now.
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Clean up how we reclaim local scopes.
It used to work like this (commit 3216):
1. 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', and its result is saved to a
variable in the default space (because it's already incremented at
the time of the call)
2. If a function starts with 'local-scope', force it to be reclaimed
before each return. However, since locals may be returned, *very
carefully* don't reclaim those. (See the logic in the old `escaping`
and `should_update_refcount` functions.)
However, this approach had issues. We needed two separate commands for
'local-scope' (reclaim locals on exit) and 'new-default-space'
(programmer takes charge of reclaiming locals). The hard-coded
reclamation duplicated refcounting logic. In addition to adding
complexity, this implementation failed to work if a function overwrites
default-space after setting up a local-scope (the old default-space is
leaked). It also fails in the presence of continuations. Calling a
continuation more than once was guaranteed to corrupt memory (commit
3986).
After this commit, reclaiming local scopes now works like this:
Update refcounts of products for every PRIMITIVE instruction.
For non-primitive instructions, all the work happens in the `return`
instruction:
increment refcount of ingredients to `return`
(unless -- one last bit of ugliness -- they aren't saved in the
caller)
decrement the refcount of the default-space
use existing infrastructure for reclaiming as necessary
if reclaiming default-space, first decrement refcount of each
local
again, use existing infrastructure for reclaiming as necessary
This commit (finally!) completes the bulk[1] of step 2 of the plan in
commit 3991. It was very hard until I gave up trying to tweak the
existing implementation and just test-drove layer 43 from scratch.
[1] There's still potential for memory corruption if we abuse
`default-space`. I should probably try to add warnings about that at
some point (todo in layer 45).
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Clean up the narrative of spaces as I struggle to reimplement
`local-scope` by the plan of commit 3992.
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Use the real original instruction in error messages.
Thanks Ella Couch.
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Provide an option to disable memory reclamation. This makes edit/ *much*
more responsive. The cost: memory use grows monotonically. Since we no
longer have a safe way to reclaim heap allocations, we never do so.
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Yet another attempt at trying to clean up commit 3216. I think this solution
might finally let me stop agonizing over the problem. State variables for
distinguishing call-sites are a reasonable mechanism, orthogonal to waypoints
and the hook functions to hold them.
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Improve an error message. 'local-scope' is far more common in Mu programs
than the more fundamental 'default-space'.
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Undo 3743. Really any time we create new instructions from whole cloth
during rewriting or transform, the whole notion of 'original name' goes
out the window. Pointless trying to fight that fact of life.
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One way to ensure we always set old_name is to create a method to
initialize names as opposed to just assigning them.
Still not ideal because we still assign directly most of the time, so
it's easy to forget.
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The drawback of this is that we forget to initialize old_name when we
create instructions out of whole cloth in a few places. But this problem
already existed..
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Be more disciplined about tagging 2 different concepts in the codebase:
a) Use the phrase "later layers" to highlight places where a layer
doesn't have the simplest possible self-contained implementation.
b) Use the word "hook" to point out functions that exist purely to
provide waypoints for extension by future layers.
Since both these only make sense in the pre-tangled representation of
the codebase, using '//:' and '#:' comments to get them stripped out of
tangled output.
(Though '#:' comments still make it to tangled output at the moment.
Let's see if we use it enough to be worth supporting. Scenarios are
pretty unreadable in tangled output anyway.)
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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..
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Periodic cleanup to replace 'reply' with 'return' everywhere in the
repo.
I use 'reply' for students to help reinforce the metaphor of function
calls as being like messages through a pipe. But that causes 'reply' to
get into my muscle memory when writing Mu code for myself, and I worry
that that makes Mu seem unnecessarily alien to anybody reading on
Github.
Perhaps I should just give it up? I'll try using 'return' with my next
student.
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Standardize on calling literate waypoints "Special-cases" rather than
"Cases". Invariably there's a default path already present.
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One more place we were missing expanding type abbreviations: inside
container definitions.
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It might be too much, particularly if students start peeking inside .mu
files early. But worth a shot for not just to iron out the kinks in the
abbreviation system.
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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.
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array length = number of elements
array size = in locations
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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'
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Never mind, just close your nose and replace that function parameter
with a global variable.
This may not always be the solution for the problem of layers being
unable to add parameters and arguments, but here it works well and it's
unclear what problems the global might cause.
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Replace an integer with a boolean across two layers of function calls.
It has long been one of the ugliest consequences of my approach with
layers that functions might need to be introduced with unnecessary
arguments simply because we have no clean way to add parameters to a
function definition after the fact -- or to add the default argument
corresponding to that parameter in calls. This problem is exacerbated by
the redundant argument having to be passed in through multiple layers of
functions. In this instance:
In layer 20 we define write_memory with an argument called
'saving_instruction_products' which isn't used yet.
In layer 36 we reveal that we use this argument in a call to
should_update_refcounts_in_write_memory() -- where it is again not used
yet.
Layer 43 finally clarifies what we're shooting for:
a) In general when we need to update some memory, we always want to
update refcounts.
b) The only exception is when we're reclaiming locals in a function
that set up its stack frame using 'local-scope' (signalling that it
wants immediate reclamation). At that point we avoid decrementing
refcounts of 'escaping' addresses that are being returned, and we also
avoid incrementing refcounts of products in the caller instruction.
The latter case is basically why we need this boolean and its dance
across 3 layers.
In summary, write_memory() needs to update refcounts except if:
we're writing products for an instruction,
the instruction is not a primitive, and
the (callee) recipe for the instruction starts with 'local-scope'.
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