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!
We want the pattern to be key:0, val:0, key:1, val:1, and so on... This
was previously using 0,1,2,3...
When we use Call directly, we need to fix this. Previously this was dead
code which is why the bug wasn't caught.
This removes the secret channel from the call function. Having it made
it more complicated to write new function engines, and it's not clear
why it was even needed in the first place. It seems that even the
current generation of function engines work just fine without it.
Co-authored-by: Samuel Gélineau <gelisam@gmail.com>
Most of the time, we don't need to have a dynamic call sub graph, since
the actual function call could be represented statically as it
originally was before lambda functions were implemented. Simplifying the
graph shape has important performance benefits in terms of both keep the
graph smaller (memory, etc) and in avoiding the need to run transactions
at runtime (speed) to reshape the graph.
Co-authored-by: Samuel Gélineau <gelisam@gmail.com>
This adds a forkv statement which is used to iterate over a map with a
body of statements. This is an important data transformation tool which
should be used sparingly, but is important to have.
An import statement inside of a forkv loop is not currently supported.
We have a simple hack to detect the obvious cases, but more deeply
nested scenarios probably won't be caught, and you'll get an obscure
error message if you try to do this.
This was incredibly challenging to get right, and it's all thanks to Sam
for his brilliance.
Note, I couldn't think of a better keyword that "forkv" but suggestions
are welcome if you think you have a better idea. Other ideas were formap
and foreach, but neither got me very excited.
This adds a for statement which is used to iterate over a list with a
body of statements. This is an important data transformation tool which
should be used sparingly, but is important to have.
An import statement inside of a for loop is not currently supported. We
have a simple hack to detect the obvious cases, but more deeply nested
scenarios probably won't be caught, and you'll get an obscure error
message if you try to do this.
This was incredibly challenging to get right, and it's all thanks to Sam
for his brilliance.
Co-authored-by: Samuel Gélineau <gelisam@gmail.com>
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.
This adds a modern type unification algorithm, which drastically
improves performance, particularly for bigger programs.
This required a change to the AST to add TypeCheck methods (for Stmt)
and Infer/Check methods (for Expr). This also changed how the functions
express their invariants, and as a result this was changed as well.
This greatly improves the way we express these invariants, and as a
result it makes adding new polymorphic functions significantly easier.
This also makes error output for the user a lot better in pretty much
all scenarios.
The one downside of this patch is that a good chunk of it is merged in
this giant single commit since it was hard to do it step-wise. That's
not the end of the world.
This couldn't be done without the guidance of Sam who helped me in
explaining, debugging, and writing all the sneaky algorithmic parts and
much more. Thanks again Sam!
Co-authored-by: Samuel Gélineau <gelisam@gmail.com>
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 removes the `Close() error` and replaces it with a more modern
Stream API that takes a context. This removes boilerplate and makes
integration with concurrent code easier. The only downside is that there
isn't an explicit cleanup step, but only one function was even using
that and it was possible to switch it to a defer in Stream.
This also renames the functions from polyfunc to just func which we
determine by API not naming.
This adds the requirement that all function implementations provider a
String() string method so that these can be used as vertices in the
pgraph library. If we eventually move to generics for the pgraph DAG,
then this might not matter, but it's not bad that these have names
either.
In case something in the type unification tries to speculatively call
Info before it's ready to produce a valid sig, make sure we only return
a definitive answer (non-nil, and no variant types) once we've
conclusively finished defining the signature.
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!
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.
