This mega patch primarily introduces a new function engine. The main
reasons for this new engine are:
1) Massively improved performance with lock-contended graphs.
Certain large function graphs could have very high lock-contention which
turned out to be much slower than I would have liked. This new algorithm
happens to be basically lock-free, so that's another helpful
improvement.
2) Glitch-free function graphs.
The function graphs could "glitch" (an FRP term) which could be
undesirable in theory. In practice this was never really an issue, and
I've not explicitly guaranteed that the new graphs are provably
glitch-free, but in practice things are a lot more consistent.
3) Simpler graph shape.
The new graphs don't require the private channels. This makes
understanding the graphs a lot easier.
4) Branched graphs only run half.
Previously we would run two pure side of an if statement, and while this
was mostly meant as an early experiment, it stayed in for far too long
and now was the right time to remove this. This also means our graphs
are much smaller and more efficient too.
Note that this changed the function API slightly. Everything has been
ported. It's possible that we introduce a new API in the future, but it
is unexpected to cause removal of the two current APIs.
In addition, we finally split out the "schedule" aspect from
world.schedule(). The "pick me" aspects now happen in a separate
resource, rather than as a yucky side-effect in the function. This also
lets us more precisely choose when we're scheduled, and we can observe
without being chosen too.
As usual many thanks to Sam for helping through some of the algorithmic
graph shape issues!
Initially I wasn't 100% clear or decided on the send/recv semantics.
After some experimenting, I think this is much closer to what we want.
Nothing should break or regress here, this only enables more
possibilities.
I've been waiting to write this patch for a long time. I firmly believe
that the idea of "exported resources" was truly a brilliant one, but
which was never even properly understood by its original inventors! This
patch set aims to show how it should have been done.
The main differences are:
* Real-time modelling, since "once per run" makes no sense.
* Filter with code/functions not language syntax.
* Directed exporting to limit the intended recipients.
The next step is to add more "World" reading and filtering functions to
make it easy and expressive to make your selection of resources to
collect!
Instead of constantly making these updates, let's just remove the year
since things are stored in git anyways, and this is not an actual modern
legal risk anymore.
With the recent merging of embedded package imports and the entry CLI
package, it is now possible for users to build in mcl code into a single
binary. This additional permission makes it explicitly clear that this
is permitted to make it easier for those users. The condition is phrased
so that the terms can be "patched" by the original author if it's
necessary for the project. For example, if the name of the language
(mcl) changes, has a differently named new version, someone finds a
phrasing improvement or a legal loophole, or for some other
reasonable circumstance. Now go write some beautiful embedded tools!
This plumbs through the new Output method signature that accepts a table
of function pointers to values and relies on the previous storing of the
function pointers to be used for the lookup right now. This has the
elegant side-effect that Output generation could run in parallel with
the graph engine, as the engine only needs to pause to take a snapshot
of the current values tables.
Co-authored-by: Samuel Gélineau <gelisam@gmail.com>
There were a bunch of packages that weren't well documented. With the
recent split up of the lang package, I figured it would be more helpful
for new contributors who want to learn the structure of the project.
