1. 23 Mar, 2021 1 commit
  2. 16 Dec, 2020 1 commit
    • Daniel Martí's avatar
      all: rewrite interfaces and APIs to support int64 · f6e9a891
      Daniel Martí authored
      We only supported representing Int nodes as Go's "int" builtin type.
      This is fine on 64-bit, but on 32-bit, it limited those node values to
      just 32 bits. This is a problem in practice, because it's reasonable to
      want more than 32 bits for integers.
      
      Moreover, this meant that IPLD would change behavior if built for a
      32-bit platform; it would not be able to decode large integers, for
      example, when in fact that was just a software limitation that 64-bit
      builds did not have.
      
      To fix this problem, consistently use int64 for AsInt and AssignInt.
      
      A lot more functions are part of this rewrite as well; mainly, those
      revolving around collections and iterating. Some might never need more
      than 32 bits in practice, but consistency and portability is preferred.
      Moreover, many are interfaces, and we want IPLD interfaces to be
      flexible, which will be important for ADLs.
      
      Below are some GNU sed lines which can be used to quickly update
      function signatures to use int64:
      
      	sed -ri 's/(func.* AsInt.*)\<int\>/\1int64/g' **/*.go
      	sed -ri 's/(func.* AssignInt.*)\<int\>/\1int64/g' **/*.go
      	sed -ri 's/(func.* Length.*)\<int\>/\1int64/g' **/*.go
      	sed -ri 's/(func.* LookupByIndex.*)\<int\>/\1int64/g' **/*.go
      	sed -ri 's/(func.* Next.*)\<int\>/\1int64/g' **/*.go
      	sed -ri 's/(func.* ValuePrototype.*)\<int\>/\1int64/g' **/*.go
      
      Note that the function bodies, as well as the code that calls said
      functions, may need to be manually updated with the integer type change.
      That cannot be automated, because it's possible that an automated fix
      would silently introduce potential overflows not being handled.
      
      Some TODOs and FIXMEs for overflow checks are removed, since we remove
      some now unnecessary int64->int conversions. On the other hand, the
      older codecs based on refmt need to gain some overflow check TODOs,
      since refmt uses ints. That is okay for now, since we'll phase out refmt
      pretty soon.
      
      While at it, update codectools to use int64 for token Length fields, so
      that it properly supports full IPLD integers without machine-dependent
      behavior and overflow checks. The budget integer is also updated to be
      int64, since the lengths it uses are now int64.
      
      Note that this refactor needed changes to the Go code generator as well
      as some of the tests, for the purpose of updating all the code.
      
      Finally, note that the code-generated iterator structs do not use int64
      fields internally, even though they must return int64 numbers to
      implement the interface. This is because they use the numeric fields to
      count up to a small finite amount (such as the number of fields in a Go
      struct), or up to the length of a map/slice. Neither of them can ever
      outgrow "int".
      
      Fixes #124.
      f6e9a891
  3. 01 Dec, 2020 2 commits
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Revert "Make the cidlink.Link type only usable as a pointer." · 96aa55ea
      Eric Myhre authored
      Trying to make CIDs only usable as a pointer would be nice from a
      consistency perspective, but has other consequences.
      
      It's easy to forget this (and I apparently just did), but...
      We often use link types as map keys.  And this is Important.
      
      That means trying to handle CIDs as pointers leads to nonsensical
      results: pointers are technically valid as a golang map key, but
      they don't "do the right thing" -- the equality check ends up operating
      on the the pointer rather than on the data.  This is well-defined,
      but generally useless for these types in context.
      96aa55ea
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Make the cidlink.Link type only usable as a pointer. · 55dcf0c3
      Eric Myhre authored
      As the comments in the diff say: it's a fairly sizable footgun for
      users to need to consider whether they expect the pointer form or
      the bare form when inspecting what an `ipld.Link` interface contains:
      so, let's just remove the choice.
      
      There's technically no reason for the Link.Load method to need to be
      attached to the pointer receiver other than removing this footgun.
      From the other side, though, there's no reason *not* to make it
      attached to the pointer receiver, because any time a value is assigned
      to an interface type, it necessarily heap-escapes and becomes a pointer
      anyway.  So, making it unconditional and forcing the pointer to be
      clear in the user's hands seems best.
      55dcf0c3
  4. 21 Oct, 2020 1 commit
  5. 24 Sep, 2020 1 commit
  6. 26 Mar, 2020 1 commit
  7. 02 Mar, 2020 1 commit
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Promote NodeAssembler/NodeStyle solution to core. · 4eb8c55c
      Eric Myhre authored
      This is a *lot* of changes.  It's the most significant change to date,
      both in semantics and in character count, since the start of this repo.
      It changes the most central interfaces, and significantly so.
      
      But all tests pass.  And all benchmarks are *improved*.
      
      The Node interface (the reading side) is mostly unchanged -- a lot of
      consuming code will still compile and work just fine without changes --
      but any other Node implementations out there might need some updating.
      
      The NodeBuilder interface (the writing side) is *extremely* changed --
      any implementations out there will *definitely* need change -- and most
      consumers will too.  It's unavoidable with a semantic fix this big.
      The performance improvements should make it worth your while, though.
      
      If you want more background on how and why we got here, you've got
      quite a few commits on the "research-admissions" branches to catch up
      on reading.  But here's a rundown of the changes:
      
      (Get a glass of water or something calming before reading...)
      
      === NodeAssembler introduced! ===
      
      NodeAssembler is a new interface that describes most of the work of
      creating and filling data into a new Node.
      
      The NodeBuilder interface is still around, but changed in role.
      A NodeBuilder is now always also a NodeAssembler; additionally, it can
      return the final Node to you.
      
      A NodeAssembler, unlike NodeBuilder, can **not** return a Node to you.
      In this way, a NodeBuilder represents the ability to allocate memory.
      A NodeAssembler often *does not*: it's just *filling in* memory.
      
      This design overall is much more friendly to efficient operations:
      in this model, we do allocations in bulk when a NodeBuilder is used,
      and then NodeAssemblers are used thereafter to fill it in -- this
      mental model is very friendly to amortizing memory allocations.
      Previously, the NodeBuilder interface made such a pattern of use
      somewhere between difficult and outright impossible, because it was
      modeled around building small values, then creating a bigger value and
      inserting the smaller ones into it.
      
      This is the key change that cascaded into producing the entire other
      set of changes which land in this commit.
      
      The NodeBuilder methods for getting "child builders" are also gone
      as a result of these changes.  The result feels a lot smoother.
      (You can still ask for the NodeStyle for children of a recursive kind!
      But you'll find that even though it's possible, it's rarely necessary.)
      
      We see some direct improvements from this interface change already.
      We'll see even more in the future: creating values when using codegen'd
      implementations of Node was hugely encumbered by the old NodeBuilder
      model; NodeAssembler *radically* raises the possible ceiling for
      performance of codegen Node implementations.
      
      === NodeStyle introduced ===
      
      NodeStyle is a new interface type that is used to carry information
      about concrete node implementations.
      
      You can always use a NodeStyle to get a NodeBuilder.
      
      NodeStyle may also have additional features on it which can be detected
      by interface checks.  (This isn't heavily used yet, but we imagine it
      might become handy in the future.)
      
      NodeStyle replaces NodeBuilder in many function arguments,
      because often what we wanted was to communicate a selection of Node
      implementation strategy, but not actually the start of construction;
      the NodeStyle interface now allows us to *say that*.
      
      NodeStyle typically cost nothing to pass around, whereas a NodeBuilder
      generally requires an allocation to create and initialize.  This means
      we can use NodeStyle more freely in many contexts.
      
      === node package paths changed ===
      
      Node implementations are now in packages under the "node/*" directory.
      Previously, they were under an "impl/*" directory.
      
      The "impl/free" package is replaced by the the "node/basic" package!
      The package name was "ipldfree"; it's now "basicnode".
      
      === basicnode is an improved runtime/anycontent Node implementation ===
      
      The `basicnode` package works much the same as the `ipldfree` package
      used to -- you can store any kind of data in it, and it just does as
      best it can to represent and handle that, and it works without any
      kind of type info nor needs of compile-time special support, etc --
      while being just quietly *better at it*.
      
      The resident memory size of most things has gone down.
      (We're not using "fat unions" in the implementation anymore.)
      
      The cost of iterating maps has gone down *dramatically*.
      Iteration previously suffered from O(n) allocations due to
      expensive `runtime.conv*` calls when yielding keys.
      Iteration is now O(1) (!!) because we redesigned `basicnode` internals
      to use "internal pointers" more heavily, and this avoids the costs
      from `runtime.conv*`.
      (We could've done this separately from the NodeAssembler change,
      admittedly.  But both are the product of research into how impactful
      clever use of "internal pointers" can be, and lots of code in the
      neighborhood had to be rewritten for the NodeAssembler interface,
      so, these diffs arrive as one.)
      
      Error messages are more informative.
      
      Many small operations should get a few nanoseconds faster.
      (The implementation uses more concrete types and fewer switch
      statements.  The difference probably isn't the most noticeable part of
      all these changes, but it's there.)
      
      --- basicnode constructor helpers do all return pointers ---
      
      All the "New*" helper functions in the basicnode package return
      interfaces which are filled by a pointer now.
      This is change from how they worked previously when they were first
      implemented in the "rsrch" package.
      
      The experience of integrating basicnode with the tests in the traversal
      package made it clear that having a mixture of pointer and non-pointer
      values flying around will be irritating in practice.  And since it is
      the case that when returning values from inside a larger structure,
      we *must* end up returning a pointer, pointers are thus what we
      standardize on.
      
      (There was even some writeup in the HACKME file about how we *might*
      encounter issues on this, and need to change to pointers-everywhere --
      the "pointer-vs-value inhabitant consistency" heading.  Yep: we did.
      And since this detail is now resolved, that doc section is dropped.)
      
      This doesn't really make any difference to performance.
      The old way would cause an alloc in those method via 'conv*' methods;
      the new way just makes it more explicit and go through a different
      runtime method at the bottom, but it's still the same number of
      allocations for essentially the same reasons.  (I do wonder if at some
      future point, the golang compiler might get cleverer about eliding
      'conv*' calls, and then this change we make here might be unfortunate;
      but that's certainly not true today, nor in the future at any proximity
      that I can foresee.)
      
      === iterator getters return nil for wrong-kind ===
      
      The Node.MapIterator and Node.ListIterator methods now return nil
      if you call them on non-maps or non-lists.
      
      Previously, they would return an iterator, but using it would just
      constantly error.
      
      I don't think anyone was honestly really checking those error thunks,
      and they made a lot of boilerplate white noise in the implementations,
      and the error is still entirely avoidable by checking the node kind
      up-front (and this is strictly preferable anyway, since it's faster
      than getting an error thunk, poking it to get the error, etc)...
      so, in total, there seem like very few reasons these were useful:
      the idea is thus dropped.
      
      Docs in the Node interface reflect this.
      
      === node/mixins makes new Node implementations easier ===
      
      The mixins package isn't usable directly, but if you're going to make
      a new Node implementation, it should save you a lot of typing...
      and also, boost consistency of basic error handling.
      
      Codegen will look forward to using this.  (Codegen already had much of
      these semantics internally, and so this package is sort of lifting that
      back out to be more generally usable.  By making it live out here as
      exported symbols in the core library, we should also reduce the sheer
      character count of codegen output.)
      
      === 'typed.Node' is now 'schema.TypedNode' ===
      
      A bunch of interfaces that were under the "impl/typed" path moved to
      be in the "schema" package instead.  This probably makes sense to you
      if you look at them and needs no further explanation.
      
      (The reason it comes in this diff, though, is that it was forced:
      adding better tests to the traversal package highlighted a bunch of
      cyclic dependency issues that came from 'typed.Node' being in a
      package that had concrete use of 'basicnode'.)
      
      === codecs ===
      
      The 'encoding' package is now named 'codec'.
      
      This name is shorter; it's more in line with vocabulary we use
      elsewhere in the IPLD project (whereas 'encoding' was more of a nod
      to the naming found in the golang standard library); and in my personal
      opinion it does better at describing the both directions of the process
      (whereas 'encoding' sounds like only the to-linear-bytes direction).
      
      I just like it better.
      
      === unmarshal functions no longer return node ===
      
      Unmarshal functions accept an NodeAssembler parameter (rather than
      a NodeBuilder, as before, nor a NodeStyle, which might also make sense
      in the new family of interfaces).
      
      This means they no longer need to return a Node, either -- the caller
      can decide where the unmarshalled data lands.  If the caller is using
      a NodeBuilder, it means they can call Build on that to get the value.
      (If it's a codegen NodeBuilder with More Information, the caller can
      use any specialized functions to get the more informative pointers
      without need for casting!)
      
      Broadly speaking, this means users of unmarshal functions have more
      control over how memory allocation comes into play.
      
      We may want to add more helper functions to the various codec packages
      which take a NodeStyle argument and do return a Node.  That's not in
      this diff, though.  (Need to decide what pattern of naming these
      various APIs would deserve, among other things.)
      
      === the fluent package ===
      
      The fluent package changed significantly.
      
      The readonly/Node side of it is dropped.  It didn't seem to get a ton
      of exercise in practice; the 'traversal' package (and in the future,
      perhaps also a 'cursor' package) addresses a lot of the same needs,
      and what remains is also covered well these days by the 'must' package;
      and the performance cost of fluent node wrappers as well as the
      composability obstruction of them... is just too much to be worth it.
      
      The few things that used fluent.Node for reading data now mostly use
      the 'must' package instead (and look better for it, imo).
      
      It's possible that some sort of fluent.Node will be rebuilt someday,
      but it's not entirely clear to me what it should look like, and indeed
      whether or not it's a good idea to have in the repo at all if the
      performance of it is counterindicated in a majority of situations...
      so, it's not part of today's update.
      
      The writing/NodeBuilder/NodeAssembler fluent wrappers are continued.
      It's similar to before (panics promptly on errors, and has a lot of
      closures)... but also reflects all of the changes made in the migration
      towards NodeAssembler: it doesn't return intermediate nodes, and
      there's much less kerfuffle with getting child builders.
      Overall, the fluent builders are now even more streamlined than before;
      the closures need even fewer parameters; great success!
      
      The fluent.NodeAssembler interface retains the "Create" terminology
      around maps and lists, even though in the core interfaces,
      the ipld.NodeAssembler interface now says "Begin" for maps and lists.
      This is because the fluent.NodeAssembler approach, with its use of
      closures, really does do the whole operation in one swoop.
      
      (It's amusing to note that this change includes finally nuking some
      fairly old "REVIEW" comment blocks from the old fluent package which
      regarded the "knb" value and other such sadness around typed recursion.
      Indeed, we've finally reviewed that: and the answer was indeed to do
      something drastically different to make those recursions dance well.)
      
      === selectors ===
      
      Selectors essentially didn't change as part of this diff.  Neat.
      
      (They should get a lot faster when applied, because our node
      implementations hit a lot less interface boxing in common operations!
      But the selector code itself didn't need to change to get the gains.)
      
      The 'selector/builder' helper package *did* change a bit.
      The changes are mostly invisible to the user.
      I do have some questions about the performance of the result; I've got
      a sneaking suspicion there's now a bunch of improvements that might be
      easier to get to now than they would've been previously.  But, this is
      not my quest today.  Perhaps it will deserve some review in the future.
      
      The 'selector/builder' package should be noted as having some
      interesting error handling strategies.  Namely, it doesn't.
      Any panics raised by the fluent package will just keep rising; there's
      no place where they're converted to regular error value returns.
      I'm not sure this is a good interface, but it's the way it was before
      I started passing through, so that's the way it stays after this patch.
      
      ExploreFieldsSpecBuilder.Delete disappears.  I hope no one misses it.
      I don't think anyone will.  I suspect it was there only because the
      ipld.MapBuilder interface had such a method and it seemed like a
      reasonable conservative choice at the time to proxy it; now that the
      method proxied is gone, though, so too shall go this.
      
      === traversal ===
      
      Traversal is mostly the same, but a few pieces of config have new names.
      
      `traversal.Config.LinkNodeBuilderChooser` is now
      `traversal.Config.LinkTargetNodeStyleChooser`.
      Still a mouthful; slightly more accurate; and reflects that it now
      works in terms of NodeStyle, which gives us a little more finesse in
      reasoning about where NodeBuilders are actually created, and thus
      better control and insight into where allocations happen.
      
      `traversal.NodeBuilderChooser` is now
      `traversal.LinkTargetNodeStyleChooser` for the same reasons.
      
      The actual type of the `LinkTargetNodeStyleChooser` now requires
      returning a `NodeStyle`, in case all the naming hasn't made it obvious.
      
      === disappearing node packages ===
      
      A couple of packages under 'impl/*' are just dropped.
      
      This is no real loss.  The packages dropped were Node implementations
      that simply weren't done.  Deleting them is an increase in honesty.
      
      This doesn't mean something with the same intentions as those packages
      won't come back; it's just not today.
      
      --- runtime typed node wrapper disappeared ---
      
      This one will come back.  It was just too much of a pain to carry
      along in this diff.  Since it was also a fairly unfinished
      proof-of-concept with no downstream users, it's easier to drop and
      later reincarnate it than it is to carry it along now.
      
      === linking ===
      
      Link.Load now takes a `NodeAssembler` parameter instead of a
      `NodeBuilder`, and no longer returns a `Node`!
      
      This should result in callers having a little more control over where
      allocations may occur, letting them potentially reuse builders, etc.
      
      This change should also make sense considering how codec.Unmarshal
      now similarly takes a NodeAssembler argument and does not return
      a Node value since its understood that the caller has some way to
      access or gather the effects, and it's none of our business.
      
      Something about the Link interface still feels a bit contorted.
      Having to give the Load method a Loader that takes half the same
      arguments all over again is definitely odd.  And it's tempting to take
      a peek at fixing this, since the method is getting a signature change.
      It's unclear what exactly to do about this, though, and probably
      a consequential design decision space... so it shall not be reopened
      today during this other large refactor.  Maybe soon.  Maybe.
      
      === the dag-json codec ===
      
      The dag-json codec got harder to implement.  Rrgh.
      
      Since we can't tell if something is going to become a Link until
      *several tokens in*, dag-json is always a bit annoying to deal with.
      Previously, however, dag-json could still start optimistically building
      a map node, and then just... quietly drop it if we turn out to be
      dealing with a link instead.  *That's no longer possible*: the process
      of using NodeAssembler doesn't have a general purpose mechanism for
      backtracking.
      
      So.  Now the dag-json codec has to do even more custom work to buffer
      tokens until it knows what to do with them.  Yey.
      
      The upside is: of course, the result is actually faster, and does fewer
      memory allocations, since it gathers enough information to decide what
      it's doing before it begins to do it.
      (This is a lovely example of the disciplined design of NodeAssembler's
      interface forcing other code to be better behaved and disciplined!)
      
      === traversal is faster ===
      
      The `BenchmarkSpec_Walk_MapNStrMap3StrInt/n=32` test has about doubled
      in speed on the new `basicnode` implementation in comparison to the old
      `ipldfree.Node` implementation.
      
      This is derived primarily from the drop in costs of iteration on
      `basicnode` compared to the old `ipldfree.Node` implementation.
      
      Some back-of-the-envelope math on the allocation still left around
      suggest it could double in speed again.  The next thing to target
      would be allocations of paths, followed by iterator allocations.
      Both are a tad trickier, though (see a recently merge-ignore'd
      commit for notes on iterators; and paths... paths will be a doozy
      because the path forward almost certainly involves path values
      becoming invalid if retained beyond a scope, which is... unsafe),
      so certainly need their own efforts and separate commits.
      
      === marshalling is faster ===
      
      Marshalling is much faster on the new `basicnode` implementation in
      comparison to the old `ipldfree.Node` implementation.
      Same reasons as traversal.
      
      Some fixes to marshalling which previously caused unnecessary
      allocations of token objects during recursions have also been made.
      These improve speed a bit (though it's not nearly as noticeable as the
      boost provided by the Node implementation improvements to iteration).
      
      === size hints showed up all over the place ===
      
      The appearance of size hint arguments to assembly of maps and lists
      is of course inevitable from the new NodeAssembler interface.
      
      It's particularly interesting to see how many of them showed up in
      the selector and selectorbuilder packages as constants.
      
      And super especially interesting how many of them are very small
      constants.  44 zeros.  86 ones.  25 twos.  9 threes.  2 fours.
      (Counted via variations of `grep -r 'Map(.*4, func' | wc -l`.)
      It's quite a distribution, neh?  We should probably consider some
      more optimizations specifically targeted to small maps.
      (This is an unscientific sample, and shifted by what we chose to
      focus on in testing, etc etc, but the general point stands.)
      
      `-1` is used to indicate "no idea" for size.  There's a small fix
      to the basicnode implementations to allow this.  A zero would work
      just as well in practice, but using a negative number as a hint to
      the human seems potentially useful.  It's a shame we can't make the
      argument optional; oh well.
      
      === codegen ===
      
      The codegen packages still all compile... but do nonsensical things,
      for the moment: they've not been updated to emit NodeAssembler.
      
      Since the output of codegen still isn't well rigged to test harnesses,
      this breakage is silent.
      
      The codegen packages will probably undergo a fairly tabula-rasa sweep
      in the near future.  There's been a lot of lessons learned since the
      start of the code currently there.  Updating to emit the NodeAssembler
      interface will be such a large endeavor it probably represents a good
      point to just do a fresh pass on the whole thing all at once.
      
      --------
      
      ... and that's all!
      
      Fun reading, eh?
      
      Please do forgive the refactors necessary for all this.  Truly, the
      performance improvements should make it all worth your while.
      4eb8c55c
  8. 27 Feb, 2020 1 commit
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Yank TypedNode interface into schema package. · a2ea4706
      Eric Myhre authored
      Previously it was in the 'impl/typed' package, next to the
      runtime-wrapper implementation of the interface.  This was strange.
      
      Not only should those two things be separated just on principle,
      this was also causing more import cycle problems down the road:
      for example, the traversal package needs to consider the *interface*
      for a schema-typed node in order to gracefully handle some features...
      and if this also brings in a *concrete* dependency on the
      runtime-wrapper implementation of typed nodes, not only is that
      incorrect bloat, it becomes a show stopper because (currently, at
      least) that implementation also in turn transitively imports the
      ipldfree package for some of its scalars.  Ouchouch.
      
      So.  Now the interface lives over in the 'schema' package, with all
      the other interfaces for that feature set.  Where it probably always
      should have been.
      
      ('typed.Maybe' also became known as 'schema.Maybe', which... does not
      roll off the tongue as nicely.  But this is a minor concern and we
      might reconsider the naming and appearance of that thing later anyway.)
      a2ea4706
  9. 24 Feb, 2020 1 commit
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Port codecs; add benchmarks. · d3ddbfee
      Eric Myhre authored
      Porting codecs to the new NodeAssembler interfaces was straightforward.
      
      The new codecs exist in the nodesolution "research" dirs for now,
      coexisting with the soon-to-be-legacy encoding package.
      This means we can see benchmarks of both the old and new designs within
      this commit.  (We'll probably give up on this shortly -- when dealing
      with the traversal package too, it's gonna stop being reasonable -- but
      for now it's still possible and provides interesting information.)
      
      And how *is* that performance, you ask?
      
      Peachy.
      
      Ballpark answers for marshalling:
      
      - 1079ns/op for the new Node
      - 1435ns/op for the old Node
      - 1559ns/op for stdlib json marshal of a native map.
      
      144% better than the operations of stdlib json is pretty acceptable.
      (Will more intense codegen beat that?  Oh for sure.  But this is
      *without any codegen*, so this is quite satisfactory.)
      
      Note that much of that time left is probably dominated by
      serialization-related allocations rather than the node traversal.
      I didn't dive into the pprofs to verify that yet, though.
      This picture of the overall act of marshalling is nice to have
      since it's a practical end-to-end user story.
      
      This test is also on a very small piece of data, and I expect
      the improvements will be further much bigger on larger or
      deeper-recursing structures.
      
      And lest this be skimmed over: the excellence of doing better than
      stdlib's json **while having pluginable codecs** cannot be understated.
      
      Pretty happy with this.
      
      How's unmarshal?  Eh.  About the same as before.  Remember, we chose
      *not* to do a lot of amortizations in the new 'basicnode'
      implementations, because although we *could* (and it's quite clear how
      to do so), the increase in memory size we'd face since go doesn't allow
      unions was deemed too large of a constant factor multiplier.
      We *will* see these improvements in codegen, and we can also make
      variants of 'basicnode' that do these amortizations in the future.
      
      Doing a lot of thinking about how benchmarks and tests will be managed
      as they continue to grow in count and in variation of semantic targets.
      Might have to write some tooling around it.  We'll see.
      d3ddbfee