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>
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>
Plumb through the standard context.Context so that a function can be
cancelled if someone requests this. It makes it less awkward to write
simple functions that might depend on io or network access.
This is a helper function that can generate a bunch of functions from a
struct type. This is most useful when using a CLI args struct for
command line parsing and then storing the values as functions.
An alternative version of this might choose to return all of the values
as a single giant struct.
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.
This adds a safety check in case someone sneaks in a variant type in the
simple function signature. These might be sneaky to detect, and it's
simpler to catch them right here.
From a design point of view, we might consider actually permitting
these, like we did with the simple poly API, but it's probably better
for them to get implemented in that API instead (if we decide to allow
this long-term) and keep this simple API very simple.
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.
In case a programmer makes a mistake and passes in a function using the
simple function API without a type or even without the entire value,
we'll now return a sensible error message and panic in init() instead of
requiring a test to catch this alone.
I seem to have forgotten to differentiate between the empty string and
no data because the zero value for the stored result was the empty
string. This turns it into a pointer so that we don't block the function
engine if a template or one of the other patched functions sends an
empty string as the first value.
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 a giant refactor to move functions into a hierarchial module
layout. While this isn't entirely implemented yet, it should work
correctly once all the import bits have landed. What's broken at the
moment is the template function, which currently doesn't understand the
period separator.
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!
I forgot to handle the special case of a function using this API that
received no inputs. It was waiting for the first input to come in, and
as a result was never producing any output.
Remember that functions like this should *almost* be thought of as
constants of the system. You would expect their output to never change
during the lifetime of a particular program invocation.
This patch adds a simple function API for writing simple, pure
functions. This should reduce the amount of boilerplate required for
most functions, and make growing a stdlib significantly easier. If you
need to build more complex, event-generating functions, or statically
polymorphic functions, then you'll still need to use the normal API for
now.
This also makes all of these pure functions available automatically
within templates. It might make sense to group these functions into
packages to make their logical organization easier, but this is a good
enough start for now.
Lastly, this added some missing pieces to our types library. You can now
use `ValueOf` to convert from a `reflect.Value` to the corresponding
`Value` in our type system, if an equivalent exists.
Unfortunately, we're severely lacking in tests for these new types
library additions, but look forward to growing some in the future!
