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 is a giant refactor to split the giant lang package into many
subpackages. The most difficult piece was figuring out how to extract
the extra ast structs into their own package, because they needed to
call two functions which also needed to import the ast.
The solution was to separate out those functions into their own
packages, and to pass them into the ast at the root when they're needed,
and to let the relevant ast portions call a handle.
This isn't terribly ugly because we already had a giant data struct
woven through the ast.
The bad part is rebasing any WIP work on top of this.
Since we focus on safety, it would be nice to reduce the chance of any
runtime errors if we made a typo for a resource parameter. With this
patch, each resource can export constants into the global namespace so
that typos would cause a compile error.
Of course in the future if we had a more advanced type system, then we
could support precise types for each individual resource param, but in
an attempt to keep things simple, we'll leave that for another day. It
would add complexity too if we ever wanted to store a parameter
externally.
Lastly, we might consider adding "special case" parsing so that directly
specified fields would parse intelligently. For example, we could allow:
file "/tmp/hello" {
state => exists, # magic sugar!
}
This isn't supported for now, but if it works after all the other parser
changes have been made, it might be something to consider.
This should give us options as to how a function should interact with an
FS. I feel like it's cleaner to go through the World API, and passing in
the FsURI lets us do that, but I passed in the Fs at the same time in
case it's useful for some reason. I think using it is a boundary
violation, but it's just a hunch. Does anything break when we move from
one deploy to the next?
This adds a giant missing piece of the language: proper function values!
It is lovely to now understand why early programming language designers
didn't implement these, but a joy to now reap the benefits of them. In
adding these, many other changes had to be made to get them to "fit"
correctly. This improved the code and fixed a number of bugs.
Unfortunately this touched many areas of the code, and since I was
learning how to do all of this for the first time, I've squashed most of
my work into a single commit. Some more information:
* This adds over 70 new tests to verify the new functionality.
* Functions, global variables, and classes can all be implemented
natively in mcl and built into core packages.
* A new compiler step called "Ordering" was added. It is called by the
SetScope step, and determines statement ordering and shadowing
precedence formally. It helped remove at least one bug and provided the
additional analysis required to properly capture variables when
implementing function generators and closures.
* The type unification code was improved to handle the new cases.
* Light copying of Node's allowed our function graphs to be more optimal
and share common vertices and edges. For example, if two different
closures capture a variable $x, they'll both use the same copy when
running the function, since the compiler can prove if they're identical.
* Some areas still need improvements, but this is ready for mainstream
testing and use!
The simple type unification algorithm suffered from some serious
performance and memory problems when used with certain code bases. This
adds some crucial optimizations that improve performance drastically.
I found a case where we had two missing unification rules. Now fixed in
the previous commits, and including this test to show I'm responsible.
I've added the same test in two locations for redundancy and as an
example.
This enables imports in mcl code, and is one of last remaining blockers
to using mgmt. Now we can start writing standalone modules, and adding
standard library functions as needed. There's still lots to do, but this
was a big missing piece. It was much harder to get right than I had
expected, but I think it's solid!
This unfortunately large commit is the result of some wild hacking I've
been doing for the past little while. It's the result of a rebase that
broke many "wip" commits that tracked my private progress, into
something that's not gratuitously messy for our git logs. Since this was
a learning and discovery process for me, I've "erased" the confusing git
history that wouldn't have helped. I'm happy to discuss the dead-ends,
and a small portion of that code was even left in for possible future
use.
This patch includes:
* A change to the cli interface:
You now specify the front-end explicitly, instead of leaving it up to
the front-end to decide when to "activate". For example, instead of:
mgmt run --lang code.mcl
we now do:
mgmt run lang --lang code.mcl
We might rename the --lang flag in the future to avoid the awkward word
repetition. Suggestions welcome, but I'm considering "input". One
side-effect of this change, is that flags which are "engine" specific
now must be specified with "run" before the front-end name. Eg:
mgmt run --tmp-prefix lang --lang code.mcl
instead of putting --tmp-prefix at the end. We also changed the GAPI
slightly, but I've patched all code that used it. This also makes things
consistent with the "deploy" command.
* The deploys are more robust and let you deploy after a run
This has been vastly improved and let's mgmt really run as a smart
engine that can handle different workloads. If you don't want to deploy
when you've started with `run` or if one comes in, you can use the
--no-watch-deploy option to block new deploys.
* The import statement exists and works!
We now have a working `import` statement. Read the docs, and try it out.
I think it's quite elegant how it fits in with `SetScope`. Have a look.
As a result, we now have some built-in functions available in modules.
This also adds the metadata.yaml entry-point for all modules. Have a
look at the examples or the tests. The bulk of the patch is to support
this.
* Improved lang input parsing code:
I re-wrote the parsing that determined what ran when we passed different
things to --lang. Deciding between running an mcl file or raw code is
now handled in a more intelligent, and re-usable way. See the inputs.go
file if you want to have a look. One casualty is that you can't stream
code from stdin *directly* to the front-end, it's encapsulated into a
deploy first. You can still use stdin though! I doubt anyone will notice
this change.
* The scope was extended to include functions and classes:
Go forth and import lovely code. All these exist in scopes now, and can
be re-used!
* Function calls actually use the scope now. Glad I got this sorted out.
* There is import cycle detection for modules!
Yes, this is another dag. I think that's #4. I guess they're useful.
* A ton of tests and new test infra was added!
This should make it much easier to add new tests that run mcl code. Have
a look at TestAstFunc1 to see how to add more of these.
As usual, I'll try to keep these commits smaller in the future!
It turns out that some planned additions to the parser make it so that
the map type definition can be ambiguous. As a result, this patch
updates the definition so that the map definition is not confused with
an open curly bracket anywhere.
Thanks to pestle and stbenjamin for their help understanding yacc!
This allows golang tests to be marked as root or !root using build tags.
The matching tests are then run as expected using our test runner.
This also disables test caching which is unfriendly to repeated test
running and is an absurd golang default to add.
Lastly this hooks up the testing verbose flag to tests that accept a
debug variable.
These tests aren't enabled on travis yet because of how it installs
golang.
This adds the ability to specify internal, resource specific edges, with
and without notifications. We use the special words: "Notify", "Before",
"Listen", and "Depend". They must have the first character capitalized.
They also support the "elvis" operator.
This is an initial implementation of the mgmt language. It is a
declarative (immutable) functional, reactive, domain specific
programming language. It is intended to be a language that is:
* safe
* powerful
* easy to reason about
With these properties, we hope this language, and the mgmt engine will
allow you to model the real-time systems that you'd like to automate.
This also includes a number of other associated changes. Sorry for the
large size of this patch.
