GitLab

Fix an error with marshalling that causes bytes nodes to get written as links if they are written
after a link, because the tag was never reset

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.

Most important things first!  To follow this refactor:

```
sed s/TraverseField/LookupString/g
sed s/TraverseIndex/LookupIndex/g
```

It is *literally* a sed-refactor in complexity.

---

Now, details.

This has been pending for a while, and there is some discussion in
https://github.com/ipld/go-ipld-prime/issues/22 .

In short, "Traversal" seemed like a mouthful;
"Field" was always a misnomer here;
and we've discovered several other methods that we *should* have
in the area as well, which necessitated a thought about placement.

In this commit, only the renames are applied, but you can also see
the outlines of two new methods in the Node interface, as comments.
These will be added in future commits.
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

go-ipld-cbor encodes a 0 byte ahead of cid bytes for multibase support - to maintain compatibility
of nodes encoded to CBOR, add this feature

We now have both MapIterator and ListIterator interfaces.
Both return key-value (or index-value) pairs, rather than just keys.

List iterators may seem a tad redundant: you just loop over the length,
right?  Well, sure.  But there's one place a list iterator shines:
selecting only a subset of elements.  And indeed, we'll be doing
exactly that in the traversal/selector package; therefore, we
definitely need list iterators.

We might want keys-only iterators again in the future, but at present,
I'm deferring that.  It's definitely true that we should have iterators
returning values as a core feature, since they're likely to be more
efficiently supportable than "random" access (especially when we get to
some Advanced Layout data systems), so we'll implement those first.

Additionally, note that MapIterator now returns a Node for the key.
This is to account for that fact that when using the schema system and
typed nodes, map keys can be more *specific* types.  Such nodes are
still required to be kind==ReprKind_String, but string might not be
their *preferred* native format (think: tuples with serialized to be
delimiter-separated strings); we need to account for that.
(MapBuilder.Insert method already takes a Node parameter for similar
reasons: so it can take *typed* nodes.  Node.TraverseField accepting
a plain string is the oddball out here, and should be rectified.)
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

Having a function called "Kind" return a "ReprKind" was inconsistent.

Also, we want to introduce a "Kind" method on `typed.Node` in the future.

No logical content to this change: you can safely refactor with sed.
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

We now have CIDs support!  You can create links backed by cids,
and marshal them with dag-cbor; and you can unmarshal cbor data
with dag-cbor and expect things with the CID link tag to be parsed
into CIDs and exposed as IPLD Links.  Yay!

(Dag-json is lagging.  The parse for those links is... more involved.
When supported, it'll similarly have its own unmarshal and marshal
just like the ones this diff introduces for dag-cbor.)
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

We have both generic marshal and unmarshal -- they should work for any
current or future ipld.Node implementation, and for any encoding
mechanism that can be bridged to via refmt tokens.

Tests are also updated to use builders rather than the ancient
"mutable node" nonsense, which removes... I think nearly the last
incident of that stuff; maybe we can remove it entirely soon.

As when we moved the unmarshal code into its generic form, most of
this code already existed and needed minor modification.  Git even
correctly detects it as a rename this time since the diff is so small.
And as when we moved the unmarshal code, now we also remove the
whole PushTokens interface; we've gotten to something better now.

Finally we're getting to the point we can look at wiring these up
together with all the multicodec glue and get link loading wizardry
at full voltage.  Yesss.  Sooon.
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

This unmarshal works for any NodeBuilder implementation, tada!

Old ipldfree.Node-specific unmarshal dropped... as well as that entire
system of interfaces.  They were first-pass stuff, and I think now it's
pretty clear that it was barking up the wrong tree, and we've got better
ideas to go with now instead.  (Also, as is probably obvious from a skim,
the old code flipped pretty clearly into the new code.)

Turns out refmt tokens aren't a very relevant interface in IPLD.
I'm still using them... internally, to wire up the CBOR and JSON
parsers without writing those again.  But the rest of IPLD is more
like a full-on and principled alternative to refmt/obj and all its
reflection code, and that's... pretty great.

Earlier, I had a suspicion that we would want more interfaces for token
handling on each Node implementation directly, and in particular I
suspected we might use those token-based interfaces for doing transcription
features that flip data from one concrete Node implementation into another.
(That's why we had this ipldfree.Node-specialized impl in the first place.)
**This turns out to have been wrong!**  Instead, now that we have the
ipld.NodeBuilder interface standard, that turns out to be much better suited
to solving the same needs, and it can do so:

- without adding tokens to the picture (simpler),

- without requiring tokenization-based interfaces be implemented per
concrete ipld.Node implementation (OH so much simpler),

- and arguably NodeBuilder is even doing it *better* because it doesn't
need to force linearization (and while usually that doesn't matter... one
can perhaps imagine it coming up if we wanted to do a data transcription
in memory into a Node implementation which has an orderings requirement).

So yeah, this is a nice thing to have been wrong about.  Much simpler now.

Old ipldfree.Node-specialized 'PushTokens' is still around.  Not for long,
though; it just hasn't finished being ported to the new properly generalized
style quite yet.

Note, this is not the *whole* story, still, either.  For example, still
expect to have an ipldcbor.Node which someday has a *significantly* different
set of marshal and unmarshal methods -- it may eschew refmt entirely,
and take the (very) different strategy of building a skiplist over raw
byte slices! -- that will exist *in addition* to the generic implementations
we're doing here and now.  More on that soon.

Yeah.  A lot of interfaces to get lined up, here.  Some of them tug in such
different directions that picking the right ones to make it all possible
seems roughly like solving one of the NP-hard satisfiability problems.
(Good thing it's actually with a small enough number of choices that it's
tractable; on the other hand, enumerating those choices isn't fast, and
the 'verifier' function here ain't fast either, and being a "design" thing,
it can only be evaluated on human wetware.  So yeah, an NP problem on a
tractable domain but slow setup and slow verifier.  Sounds about right.)

(uh, I'm going to write a book "Design: It's Hard: The Novel" after this.)

Tests are patched enough to keep working where they are; I think it's
possible that a reshuffle of some of them to be more closely focused on
the marshal code rather than the node implementation packages might be
in order, but I'm going to let that be a future issue.  (Oh, and they
did shine a light on one quick issue about MapBuilder initialization,
which is also now fixed.)
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>

Hej, we can finally unmarshal things again.  Plug a cbor parser
in from the refmt library and go go go!

This doesn't use any of the mutablenode stuff because, as remarked
upon a (quite a) few commits back, we want to replace that with
NodeBuilder interfaces; but, furthermore, we actually don't *need*
those interfaces for anything in an unmarshalling path (because
I don't expect we'll seriously need to switch result Node impl
in mid-unmarshalling stream); so.

You can imagine that the cbor.Node system will have a *very* different
implementation of this interface (and probably another method that
doesn't match this interface at all, and is more directly byte stream
based); but that's for later work.

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

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

You could now readily rig up the ipldfree.Node implementation to a
refmt cbor.TokenSink, for example, and go to town.  (At the moment,
doing so is left as an exercise to the reader.  We'll make that a
smooth built-in/one-word function at some point, but I'm not yet sure
exactly how that should look, so it's deferred for now.)

While working on this, a lot of other things are cooking on simmer:
I'm churning repeatedly over a lot of thoughts about A) API semantics
in general, B) how to cache CIDs of nodes, and C) how to memoize
serializations / reduce memcopies during partial tree updates...
And (unsurprisingly) I keep coming back to the conclusion that the API
for dang near everything should be immutable at heart in order to
keep things sane.  The problem is figuring out how to pursue this
A) efficiently, B) in tandem with reasonably low-friction nativeness
(i.e. I want autocompletion in a standard golang editor to be as useful
as possible!), and C) given an (as yet) lack of good builder or
mutation-applier patterns.  ipldbind was meant to be a solution to the
majority of the B and C issues there, but that rubs smack against the
grain of "let's be immutable" in golang >:/  So... a rock and a hard
place, in short.
Signed-off-by: Eric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>