I've been saying for a while[1][2][3] that adding extra abstractions makes
things harder for newcomers, and adding new notations doubly so. And then
I notice this DSL in my own backyard. Makes me feel like a hypocrite.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13565743#13570092
[2] https://lobste.rs/s/to8wpr/configuration_files_are_canary_warning
[3] https://lobste.rs/s/mdmcdi/little_languages_by_jon_bentley_1986#c_3miuf2
The implementation of the DSL was also highly hacky:
a) It was happening in the tangle/ tool, but was utterly unrelated to tangling
layers.
b) There were several persnickety constraints on the different kinds of
lines and the specific order they were expected in. I kept finding bugs
where the translator would silently do the wrong thing. Or the error messages
sucked, and readers may be stuck looking at the generated code to figure
out what happened. Fixing error messages would require a lot more code,
which is one of my arguments against DSLs in the first place: they may
be easy to implement, but they're hard to design to go with the grain of
the underlying platform. They require lots of iteration. Is that effort
worth prioritizing in this project?
On the other hand, the DSL did make at least some readers' life easier,
the ones who weren't immediately put off by having to learn a strange syntax.
There were fewer quotes to parse, fewer backslash escapes.
Anyway, since there are also people who dislike having to put up with strange
syntaxes, we'll call that consideration a wash and tear this DSL out.
---
This commit was sheer drudgery. Hopefully it won't need to be redone with
a new DSL because I grow sick of backslashes.
I've extracted it into a separate binary, independent of my Mu prototype.
I also cleaned up my tracing layer to be a little nicer. Major improvements:
- Realized that incremental tracing really ought to be the default.
And to minimize printing traces to screen.
- Finally figured out how to combine layers and call stack frames in a
single dimension of depth. The answer: optimize for the experience of
`browse_trace`. Instructions occupy a range of depths based on their call
stack frame, and minor details of an instruction lie one level deeper
in each case.
Other than that, I spent some time adjusting levels everywhere to make
`browse_trace` useful.
They uncovered one bug: in edit/003-shortcuts.mu
<scroll-down> was returning 0 for an address in one place where I
thought it was returning 0 for a boolean.
Now we've eliminated this bad interaction between tangling and punning
literals.
Pretty klunky; we're violating the type system by prepending an extra result,
so functions we want to catch exceptions around have to be header-less
and check input types at run-time.
I have a plan for a way to avoid use-after-free errors without all the
overheads of maintaining refcounts. Has the nice side-effect of
requiring manual memory management. The Mu way is to leak memory by
default and build tools to help decide when and where to expend effort
plugging memory leaks. Arguably programs should be distributed with
summaries of their resource use characteristics.
Eliminating refcount maintenance reduces time to run tests by 30% for
`mu edit`:
this commit parent
mu test: 3.9s 4.5s
mu test edit: 2:38 3:48
Open questions:
- making reclamation easier; some sort of support for destructors
- reclaiming local scopes (which are allocated on the heap)
- should we support automatically reclaiming allocations inside them?
Simplify the implementation of calling continuations. Since we don't
support next-ingredient on continuations, might as well not bother with
all that call housekeeping for ingredients.
Bugfix: I hadn't been allowing continuations to be copied.
Deepens our initial sin of managing the Mu call stack implicitly in the
C interpreter. Since the call stack was implicit, continuations had to
be implicit as well. Since continuations aren't in Mu's memory, we have
to replicate refcounting logic for them.
Surprisingly small change, considering how long it took me and how
mind-bending it was. 'return-continuation-until-mark' now behaves like
both call and return instructions, which made it hard to reason about.
They're back after a long hiatus: commit 2295 in Oct 2015.
I'm not convinced anymore that this is actually a correct implementation
of continuations. Issues on at least two fronts:
a) These aren't safe yet. Since continuations can be called multiple
times, we need to disable reclamation of locals inside a continuation.
There may be other type- or memory-safety issues. However, delimited
continuations at least seem possible to make safe. Undelimited
continuations (call/cc) though are permanently out.
b) They may not actually be as powerful as delimited continuations.
Let's see if I can build 'yield' out of these primitives.
Kartik Agaram