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!
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.
