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* 3309Kartik K. Agaram2016-09-091-14/+3
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 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.
* 3239Kartik K. Agaram2016-08-211-2/+2
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* 2990Kartik K. Agaram2016-05-201-1/+1
| | | | | | | | | | 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..
* 2933Kartik K. Agaram2016-05-061-1/+1
| | | | Can't believe I didn't run tests after 2932.
* 2931 - be explicit about making copiesKartik K. Agaram2016-05-061-16/+16
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* 2864 - replace all address:shared with just addressKartik K. Agaram2016-04-241-11/+9
| | | | | | | Now that we no longer have non-shared addresses, we can just always track refcounts for all addresses. Phew!
* 2773 - switch to 'int'Kartik K. Agaram2016-03-131-3/+3
| | | | This should eradicate the issue of 2771.
* 2762Kartik K. Agaram2016-03-121-1/+1
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* 2735 - define recipes using 'def'Kartik K. Agaram2016-03-081-2/+2
| | | | | | | | | | | | I'm dropping all mention of 'recipe' terminology from the Readme. That way I hope to avoid further bike-shedding discussions while I very slowly decide on the right terminology with my students. I could be smarter in my error messages and use 'recipe' when code uses it and 'function' otherwise. But what about other words like ingredient? It would all add complexity that I'm not yet sure is worthwhile. But I do want separate experiences for veteran programmers reading about Mu on github and for people learning programming using Mu.
* 2724 - document failures of /space:globalKartik K. Agaram2016-03-011-4/+10
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* 2712Kartik K. Agaram2016-02-261-3/+3
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* 2709Kartik K. Agaram2016-02-251-1/+0
| | | | | Only Hide_errors when strictly necessary. In other places let test failures directly show the unexpected error.
* 2681 - drop reagent types from reagent propertiesKartik K. Agaram2016-02-211-1/+1
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | All my attempts at staging this change failed with this humongous commit that took all day and involved debugging three monstrous bugs. Two of the bugs had to do with forgetting to check the type name in the implementation of shape-shifting recipes. Bug #2 in particular would cause core tests in layer 59 to fail -- only when I loaded up edit/! It got me to just hack directly on mu.cc until I figured out the cause (snapshot saved in mu.cc.modified). The problem turned out to be that I accidentally saved a type ingredient in the Type table during specialization. Now I know that that can be very bad. I've checked the traces for any stray type numbers (rather than names). I also found what might be a bug from last November (labeled TODO), but we'll verify after this commit.
* 2614Kartik K. Agaram2016-01-291-1/+1
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* 2581 - make space for the refcount in address:sharedKartik K. Agaram2016-01-201-6/+11
| | | | | | | | | | | We don't yet actually maintain the refcount. That's next. Hardest part of this was debugging the assume-console scenarios in layer 85. That took some detailed manual diffing of traces (because the output of diff was no good). New tracing added in this commit add 8% to .traces LoC. Commented out trace() calls (used during debugging) make that 45%.
* 2576 - distinguish allocated addresses from othersKartik K. Agaram2016-01-191-7/+9
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | This is the one major refinement on the C programming model I'm planning to introduce in mu. Instead of Rust's menagerie of pointer types and static checking, I want to introduce just one new type, and use it to perform ref-counting at runtime. So far all we're doing is updating new's interface. The actual ref-counting implementation is next. One implication: I might sometimes need duplicate implementations for a recipe with allocated vs vanilla addresses of the same type. So far it seems I can get away with just always passing in allocated addresses; the situations when you want to pass an unallocated address to a recipe should be few and far between.
* 2571Kartik K. Agaram2016-01-191-0/+83
Reorganize layers in preparation for a better way to manage heap allocations without ever risking use-after-free errors.