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!
Resources that can be grouped into the http:server resource must have
that prefix. Grouping is basically hierarchical, and without that common
prefix, it means we'd have to special-case our grouping algorithm.
Many years ago I built and demoed a prototype of a simple web ui with a
slider, and as you moved it left and right, it started up or shutdown
some number of virtual machines.
The webui was standalone code, but the rough idea of having events from
a high-level overview flow into mgmt, was what I wanted to test out. At
this stage, I didn't even have the language built yet. This prototype
helped convince me of the way a web ui would fit into everything.
Years later, I build an autogrouping prototype which looks quite similar
to what we have today. I recently picked it back up to polish it a bit
more. It's certainly not perfect, and might even be buggy, but it's
useful enough that it's worth sharing.
If I had more cycles, I'd probably consider removing the "store" mode,
and replace it with the normal "value" system, but we would need the
resource "mutate" API if we wanted this. This would allow us to directly
change the "value" field, without triggering a graph swap, which would
be a lot less clunky than the "store" situation.
Of course I'd love to see a GTK version of this concept, but I figured
it would be more practical to have a web ui over HTTP.
One notable missing feature, is that if the "web ui" changes (rather
than just a value changing) we need to offer to the user to reload it.
It currently doesn't get an event for that, and so don't confuse your
users. We also need to be better at validating "untrusted" input here.
There's also no major reason to use the "gin" framework, we should
probably redo this with the standard library alone, but it was easier
for me to push out something quick this way. We can optimize that later.
Lastly, this is all quite ugly since I'm not a very good web dev, so if
you want to make this polished, please do! The wasm code is also quite
terrible due to limitations in the compiler, and maybe one day when that
works better and doesn't constantly deadlock, we can improve it.
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.
I think the mgmt lib approach is a good idea, even though I'm not
putting much energy into keeping these up to date. Let's at least
re-enable the tests for now, after a few fixups.
We should run this periodically or put it in a separate job, as it's
causing the tests to fail all the time. I expect those sites may be
blocking github as they see it as a DOS.
When error messages are written to stdout, they will be considered as
output in case we want to fail from inside $( ) or backticks, and then
the error does not end up on the terminal.
Add a fold in github actions output around the ragel build.
Run the commit-message test locally, so that error can be detected
before pushing to CI. We also now accept two-letter topics.
Some minor improvement in the testing scripts.
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!
The new version of the urfave/cli library is moving to generics, and
it's completely unclear to me why this is an improvement. Their new API
is very complicated to understand, which for me, defeats the purpose of
golang.
In parallel, I needed to do some upcoming cli API refactoring, so this
was a good time to look into new libraries. After a review of the
landscape, I found the alexflint/go-arg library which has a delightfully
elegant API. It does have a few rough edges, but it's otherwise very
usable, and I think it would be straightforward to add features and fix
issues.
Thanks Alex!
