GitLab

Be aware I'm using the go mod files blindly, and actually testing and
developing using the git submodules.

I actually only wanted one update here -- the go-wish library bump,
for a specific new feature I wanted for some work on another branch --
but as long as I'm here, apparently all these bumps break nothing.

Feat/add code gen disclaimer

The readme hadn't seen an update for quite a long time, so it was just
overdue for it.  I think the comments about where to expect changes
at this point are practically accurate and now are also stated.

The Node interface, despite being so central to the entire system,
was missing a doc block on the type as a whole!  It now has one.
(I'd like to continue to iterate on this and have it do more linking
out to ipld docs for some of the more conceptual parts, but we've
got a lot of work to do on that content as well, so, for now just
doing it here is better than not having it.)
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

fix(schema/gen): return value not reference

Add a disclaimer to the header for generated code to prevent linters from complaining

Map/List should return an actual node type, not a pointer to a node. Otherwise, breaks when nested
in other map/list type

feat(schema/gen): make emit methods public

Make emit methods public to allow a preliminary method for generating code outside this module

Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

Rearrange to match 68b3383d,

and add methods to match 41d79374.

Everything compiles again, and resultant code passes what tests it has.
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

(n.b. I've already tried implementing the suggested thing for structs,
but won't link to it here as that commit is almost certainly going
to end up rebased.  Jury's still out on if the idea is good or not.
Seems like the answer is almost certainly "it depends".)

(I don't like doing nontrivial work in a merge commit, because many git
UI's don't show them well, so it will be in subsequent commits;
and this one is thus (unavoidably) broken.)

This is missing substantial amounts of context (it's really only
compared to other benchmarks *out of the repo*, as the comments note),
but it's been sitting on my hard disk for a while, so it might as well
be committed.
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

must: an alternative mechanism for fluent calls.

See the package docs string for explanation.
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

add int, bytes, and link types to code-gen

fill in generated type for list

Fill in generated types for int, link, and bytes nodes

feat(selectors): support union limit type

Refactors the limit data on recursive selectors to be a union type

switch maxDepth on ExploreRecursive to union limit type per spec

The previous names started to seem more questionable as we start
generating additional code which is natively typed rather than
interface constrained.  Now the latter stuff is in a file that
includes 'Node' as part of the filename.  This seems better.

This introduces several new methods to the type generator.
The new comment at the top of 'gen.go' explains the direction.

There are several (sizable impact) TODOs in the methods for structs;
this is because some other research I've been doing on performance
is going to result in a re-think of how we regard pointers,
and a *lot* of the struct code is going to get a shakeup shortly.
Should be coming up in about two commits or so.
(The 'Maybe' structs getting their first mention here will have
something to do with it!)

Some more file split-ups to keep node interface generation separate
from native-typed API generation will be coming up next commit.

You can also see here some TODOs regarding the future possibility of
"validate" methods.  This is something I want to pursue, but the
implementation work will be nontrivial -- those TODOs will probably
stay there a good while.
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

Child-builder recursion; and typed unmarshal over codegen native structs.

(At long last!  These child-builder methods are a step that was known
to be needed for some time now, but I've intentionally been pushing off
the implementation of it until we finally reached some *other* piece of
functionality that would depend on it and force the issue.  Finally,
that's happened: that issue is unmarshalling into natively-typed
codegenerated nodes, and that's now.  Woo!)

(Though the current focus of this is for natively-typed codegen'd nodes,
if we put further effort into reflective-bind node implementations,
they'll also lean heavily on these child-builder-getters for internally
tracking the correct `reflect.Type` to create new values of -- very
similar to what our schema-typed things are doing, just with the Golang
type system instead of our schema types.)

The child-builder getter methods more or less explain themselves.
They yield a new NodeBuilder that's correctly specialized for child
nodes in recursive structures.  This is necessary for both keys and
values in maps, and for values in lists.  For values in lists and maps,
getting the child-builder requires takes a parameter -- this is so
typed nodes (namely, structs; but some unions will also lean on this)
may have discriminated contents that differ per key or index.

The BuilderForValue functions are able to take primitive strings and
ints as parameters rather than Node, because all uses that have
discriminated results are places where complex keys are not acceptable.
Therefore primitives are fine, and preferred since it avoids boxing.

The 'free' node implementation is updated to include this feature,
as are codegenerated nodes.
(The runtime wrapper typed node implementations have partial support,
but stubbed methods where the path forward is clear but the
implementation effort nontrivial and not currently on-priority-path.)

Unmarshalling now uses these child-builder-getters to correctly handle
the passing down of constraints and typeinfo.  This addresses several
TODO's that have been in the unmarshalling code for aeons -- hooray!
(Somewhat remarkably, our solution here is much better than the one
proposed in those ancient TODO's -- we actually got this done *without*
direct abstraction-breaking examination for typed nodes.  Nice!)

Unmarshalling tests are also in this same diff.
There's even a wee little benchmark using a snippet of JSON as fixture.
This is the first time we see unmarshalling and marshalling end-to-end
connected with codegen'd nodes.  This is very exciting!

There's still some questions to be answered about the most correct
(and most performance-friendly) place to put error handling against
asks for a child NodeBuilder with an invalid key or index, which is
a very real invalid state that's reachable for typed nodes that are
structs.  Comments about that are inline in the diff.  We'll probably
have to come back to that soon, but I'm gonna let it stew on the
back burner for a bit.  Currently, panics are used, but this may not
be acceptable ergonomics.

---

It's somewhat effortful to even detail how many thoughts about
performance and the future optimization potentials go into this diff.
Some comments I had in the area of the child-builder specialization
functions included concerns on:

- where common-subexpression-elimination will and won't apply
- where inlining is possible vs facing function call stack shuffle overhead
- ... as well as how that affects common-subexpression-elimination
- ... as well as how that affects escape analysis and shifts to heap
- whether an isDiscriminated property will make any of these things better
- can BuilderForValue hang onto a builder, boxed into interface already, when appropriate?
- ... for the maps case, should amortize in a way comparable to isDiscriminated, yes?  verify.
- ... can we do that without the builder keeping another two words of memory just... around?  i don't think so.  question is if it pays for itself.
- question: do zero value no-fields structs get a bonus?  reading runtime/iface.go -- doesn't look like it.  but needs confirmation.
- ... revised statement: they do, it's just nonobvious.  iface.go doesn't have a specialization, but the mallocgc call hits a special path internally for zero, and then the typedmemmove call 'coincidentally' hits its "src == dst" short-circuit, thus also being fast.

... all in all, as many of these as possible of these concerns have
been considered and this design should be optimization-friendly;
some of them are bucketed into "we'll see", because we need to build
nontrivial programs to see how significant the needs are, as well as
to see how clever the compiler can get with what we've already done.

There are some possible alternative ways we might re-engineer the
builders in the future to make them more performance-friendly.
In particular, the fact that many builders carry a previous value
with them in anticipation of one of the 'Amend' calls -- which is
not necessarily going to be used! -- is a potential obstruction to
optimization, since it makes many structures go from zero to
more-than-zero size, and that hits significantly different paths
in the runtime with very different performance characteristics.
However, that is a bit much to change today; so the thought lives
here as a note for potential future work.

Adding a `BuilderForValueIsDiscriminated() bool` method later seems
still seems on the table, but since it wouldn't require substantial
restructurings or headaches, can be deferred until benchmarks show
us exactly how much it matters.
(A single `type ChildBuilders interface { Style() Complexity; ... }`
with some enum for `Compleixty` resembling
`SimpleList | SimpleMap | DiscriminatedMap | DiscriminatedList` might
also be a tempting way to go about this.)

---

An alternative design considered that deserves a quick note: we
could've added a `ChildBuilders()` method to the MapBuilder and
ListBuilder, and attached the further getter methods there.
This might still be viable, if we found that there are more methods
involved in the future and we want to group them: it *should* always
land on the zero-fields struct path, which means it can be done
without hitting an expensive malloc.  However, at present this doesn't
seem warranted: we don't have enough methods to make it feel important
(especially after the recognition that Node variants of methods aren't
needed in addition to the primitive args variants, described above).

---

Whew.

Lines of code in diff does not correlate to hours of thought required.

Glad to have this landing.  Even performance minutae aside,
there was a significant period of time where I was terrified that all
these abstractions were going to shatter magnificently when it came
time to do the final end-to-end unification of all this massive arc
of work.  But now it's done.  And it works.  Whew.

Next: more fleshing out of more types; perhaps more benchmarks; and
also it's time to do some more drafts of the native accessors and
builders.  Some of that already has been done in parallel in gists
while this diff was incubating, but it's time to commit it too.

Noticed due to the previous commit adding this need to the listbuilder;
but the maps have been quietly wrong for a while now.  Eep.
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

Lacking these has been an oversight.

At the data model level, appending basically can't go wrong.
As a result, we got away this this oversight so far.

The grace period is over, now.

At the schema level, this is not true -- type constraints can certainly
cause some modification to end in errors!  For lists, inconsistent
types can cause errors; for struct-with-tuple-representation, we can
encounter length limits and even distinct constraints per index!
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

Codegen continues

All flies right, yey

We also get to shorten up the asserts drastically in this set,
because we can just flat out assert that the result equals exactly
the value that we got from the type-level builder earlier.
(And go-cmp output from go-wish makes this very, very easy.)
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

I'm not sure if I like these symbol names.  Or rather, I don't,
but haven't decided on what would be preferable yet.

There's a couple of options that have come to mind:

- option 1
  - `func {{ .Type.Name }}__NodeBuilder() ipld.NodeBuilder`
  - `func {{ .Type.Name }}__ReprBuilder() ipld.NodeBuilder`

- option 2
  - `func NewBuilderFor{{ .Type.Name }}() ipld.NodeBuilder`
  - `func NewReprBuilderFor{{ .Type.Name }}() ipld.NodeBuilder`

- option 3
  - `func (Builders) {{ .Type.Name }}() ipld.NodeBuilder`
  - `func (ReprBuilders) {{ .Type.Name }}() ipld.NodeBuilder`

Option 3 would make 'Builders' and 'ReprBuilders' effectively reserved
as type names if you're using codegen.  Schemas using them could use
adjunct config specific to golang to rename things out of conflict in
the generated code, but it's still a potential friction.

Option 2 would also have some naming collision hijinx to worry about,
on further though.  Only Option 1 is immune, by virtue of using "__"
in combination with the schema rule that type names can't contain "__".

This diff is implementing Option 1.  I think I'm partial to Option 3,
but not quite confident enough in it to lunge for it yet.

Putting more methods on the *concrete* types would also be another
interesting fourth option!  These methods would ignore the actual
value, and typically be used on the zero value: e.g., usage would
resemble `Foo{}.ReprBuilder()`.
The upside of this would be we'd then have no package scoped exported
symbols except exactly the set matching type names in the schema.
However, the opportunities for confusion with this would be numerous:
we couldn't use the 'NodeBuilder' method name (because that's the
potentially-stateful/COW one), but would still be returning a
NodeBuilder type?  Etc.  Might not be good.

More to think about here in the future.
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

Fixed at least one bug along the way (in iterators, which don't have
test coverage yet, so no test fix.  Still planning to cover those
via serialization, when we get that feature, "soon").

'go doc .' on the generated code now only lists one type per type in
the schema which seems like a good sanity heuristic; and
'go doc -u .' on the package now looks much more consistent.
(There's *8* types for every struct in the schema!  Uffdah.
But if that's what it takes to make a focused,
correctness-emphasizing library surface area, so be it.)
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

I'm still aiming to keep this as simple and un-clever as possible,
because putting lipstick on a pig -- this is all about to become
strings which get shoveled back to a compiler parser anyway -- is
not useful, and becomes antiuseful if it obstructs readability...

But I'm starting to find these elements are repeated enough that
it will help rather than hurt readability to extract some things.

Also, since the munges have recently started to appear in both go code
source as well as in the templates, that starts to put more weight in
favor of extracting a function for it, which keeps the two syntactic
universes from drifting on this subject.

At the same time, moved all NodeBuilders to being unexported (by using
idents prefixed with a "_").  I looked at the godoc for the generated
code and felt this is looking like a wiser choice than exporting.

We'll need to export more methods for getting initial instances of the
now-unexported stuff... but we should be adding those anyway, so this
is not an argument against unexporting.

Some additional type idents around iterators and map builders have not
yet been hoisted to DRYed munge methods.  I'm debating if that's useful
(as you can see in the comments in that file), but leaning towards
it being more parsimoneous to just go for it.  So that'll probably be
the next commit.
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

And fixed tests for same.

The value returned is still ipld.Undef, and I'm not sure I'm going to
particularly defend that choice vs returning null, but it seems
six of one and half a dozen of the other.  Might be worth review later,
once we have some field reports on whether that vs nils would be
recieved as the more surprising/annoying choice in non-toy usage.

ipldfree.Node is now a much better implementation of Node.

In particular, this means it will work correctly when combined with the
typed.Node wrapper implementations which expect to be able to use
ErrNotExists for logic purposes.
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>