slang.git/source/slang/slang-serialize-types.h, branch master

Use fossil for IR serialization (#7619)

2025-07-08T02:36:52+00:00

* bottleneck ir module reading and writing * compute/simple working * more complex tests working * neaten * factor out SourceLoc serialization * document changes * Appease clang * Correct name serialization * remove unnecessary code * neaten * neaten

Remove some cruft/complexity from IR serialization (#7483)

2025-07-01T01:20:33+00:00

* Remove some cruft/complexity from IR serialization This is a very simple cleanup to unnecessary code paths and remove some flexibility that isn't actually needed, to hopefully simplify the task of more completely overhauling the approach to IR serialization in a later change. The concrete feature that gets removed here is a debug-only feature (which thus shouldn't be affecting any users of Slang) that was added long ago in the life of the compiler as we were working to truly separate the front- and back-ends. At the time there was a lot of code in the compiler back-end that still made use of AST-level data structures, and thus got in the way of our goal to support separate compilation and linking (such that final code generation can only depend on the IR, and not the AST). The option was used to cause the Slang IR to be serialized out and then read back in as part of compilation, to try and enforce that only the wanted constructs could pass through that bottleneck. The idea was only ever half implemented, however, because it made use of a secondary implementation path in IR serialization that supported serializing the "raw" source locations (which are heavily dependent on AST-level information, even down to the number of bytes in source files). This change removes the feature entirely, since it is no longer useful for its intended purpose, and its presence causes there to be entire second code path for source locations in IR serialization that would need to have test coverage if we wanted to be sure it kept working. In addition, our pre-existing infrastructure for module serialization had various options that have either stopped being useful, or were not really useful at the time they were introduced. For example: there are no places in the code today where we attempt to serialize out a module without including both the serialized AST and IR. If that was a feature that we ever supported, the relevant code got removed at some preceding point without breaking any of our tests or (seemingly) upsetting users. Similarly, the options being passed into writing of a serialized module included both a flag to control whether source locations should be serialized *and* a pointer to the `SourceManager` to use in that case... but it was only ever meaningful to set both, or neither. The option has been changed to just be the `SourceManager` pointer, and the name has been updated to reflect its very narrow intended use case. * format code * fixup * regenerate command line reference --------- Co-authored-by: slangbot <186143334+slangbot@users.noreply.github.com> Co-authored-by: Yong He

Cleanups related to RIFF support (#7041)

2025-05-12T17:28:05+00:00

A new approach to AST serialization (#6854)

2025-04-22T20:26:57+00:00

* A new approach to AST serialization This change completely overhauls the way that AST nodes are being serialized, and the offline source-code generation steps that enable that serialization. In practice, this ends up being a complete overhaul of the way that *modules* are being serialized (not just the AST part), although things like the serialization format for the Slang IR and for source locations are not affected. The rest of this commit message is broken down in to sections, in an attempt to help guide anybody looking at the code in how to make sense of all the changes. The Old C++ Extractor --------------------- AST serialization used to be driven by information scraped using the `slang-cpp-extractor` tool, which did an ad hoc parse of the C++ declarations of the AST node types and then generated a set of "X macros" that could be for macro-based code generation within the rest of the compiler. While the existing approach was functional, it wasn't easy to understand or maintain, and it has been getting in the way of forward progress on other features we'd like to work on in the language and compiler. This change removes the `slang-cpp-extractor` tool entirely. Marking Up the AST Declarations ------------------------------- The most notable change that contributors to the compiler may notice is the large number of invocations of a macro `FIDDLE()` on the declarations of the AST node types. The basic idea is that only declarations (namespaces, types, fields) that are preceded by `FIDDLE()` are visible to the code generator tool. So if somebody is working with the AST and wondering why a new node type isn't working, or why a field they added isn't being serialized correctly, it is probably because they need to add `FIDDLE()` in front of it. Generating the Boilerplate Code ------------------------------- The file `slang-ast-boilerplate.cpp` provides a good example of how the information extracted from the marked-up AST declarations gets used. In that file, the `FIDDLE TEMPLATE` construct is used to generate type information for each of the AST node types. Similar logic is used in `slang-ast-forward-declarations.h` to generate the declaration of the `ASTNodeType` enumeration, and forward-declare all the AST node classes. For many parts of the code, simply including that file replaces the need for the old `slang-generated-*.h` files. Replacing Visitors and Related Logic ------------------------------------ The old visitor types for the AST used the macros that were generated by `slang-cpp-extractor`, so something new was needed to replace them. The same goes for the `SLANG_AST_NODE_VIRTUAL_CALL` macros. The core of the solution implemented here is in `slang-ast-dispatch.h`. Given a "dispatchable" AST node type (say, `Expr`), a call like: ``` ASTNodeDispatcher(expr, [&](auto e) { return doSomething(e); }) ``` is an expression of type `R`, which does the equivalent of something like: ``` switch(expr->getTag()) { case ASTNodeType::VarExpr: return doSomething(static_cast(expr)); // ... } ``` The `SLANG_AST_NODE_VIRTUAL_CALL` macro is now implemented in terms of `ASTNodeDispatcher`. The implementation of the visitor types is more involved. The code in this change retains some of the macro names from the original version, just to try and make the parallels more clear. The visitor types are all implemented on top of the `ASTNodeDispatcher` approach, and use `FIDDLE TEMPLATE` to generate all the boilerplate `visit*()` method declarations. Refactoring of `Linkage` Module Loading --------------------------------------- Needing to revisit all the places where modules get deserialized made it clear that there is a lot of complexity and apparent duplication in the core routines on the `Linkage` that get used for loading modules. This change tries to clean up some of that logic, but it is worth noting that there are two legacy features that get in the way of making things as clean as they should be: * The `LoadedModuleDictionary` type that gets passed around a lot exists entirely to handle the corner case where somebody uses the Slang API to perform a compilation with multiple `TranslationUnitRequest`s in the same `FrontEndCompileRequest`, and one of the translation units `import`s the module defined by another of the translation units. * There are a lot of special-case behaviors and routines entirely there to support the `ModuleLibrary` feature, although that feature should be considered deprecated (or at least subject to getting entirely re-designed down the line). The basic idea of the cleanup is that all of the (non-deprecated) ways load a module from a serialized binary, or compile one from source should now bottleneck through `loadModuleImpl`, which then bifurcates into `loadSourceModuleImpl` for the compilation case and `loadBinaryModuleImpl` for the deserialization case. High-Level Serialization Approach --------------------------------- The old serialization logic used the [RIFF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Interchange_File_Format) format to encode the high-level structure of things, and this change retains that usage (and actually doubles down on the RIFF usage). The old serialization system relied on the idea that for any given type `Foo` that wants to support serialization, there should be something like a `SerialFooData` type in C++, that can represent the state of a `Foo`, and then the actual serialization applied to that `SerialFooData`. This means that in most cases there are four pieces of code written: * During serialization: * Copying the data of a `Foo` in memory over to a `SerialFooData` in memory * Writing the state of a `SerialFooData` into the serialized data stream * During deserialization: * Reading the state of a `SerialFooData` from a serialized data stream * Copying the data of the `SerialFooData` in memory over to a `Foo` The new logic gets rid of the intermediate `SerialFooData`. In the serialization direction, we take a `Foo` and write it to the `RIFFContainer` directly, or using some other utilities layered on top of it. In the deserialization direction, we have additional flexibility. Given a `RIFFContainer::Chunk*` that represents a serialized `Foo`, we often navigate through the in-memory representation of the RIFF data to get to the parts of the serialized value that we actually want/need, without needing to deserialize the entire `Foo`. To support this kind of operation, this change introduces a few helper types like `ContainerChunkRef` an `ModuleChunkRef`, that are little more than typed wrappers around a `RIFFContainer::Chunk*`. The Module "Container" Part --------------------------- A serialized `Module` is encoded as a RIFF chunk, using logic in `slang-serialize-container.cpp` - both before and after this change. This change reorganizes a lot of the code in that file, to account for the way that eliminating the intermediate `SerialContainerData` type streamlines the overall task of writing out the parts of the module. In the deserialization logic... there isn't really much to do in `slang-serialize-container.cpp`. Most of the logic in `slang.cpp` and `slang-module-library.cpp` that pertains to deserializing modules uses the `ModuleChunkRef`-based approach, and simply extracts the pieces of the serialized module that it needs. The Actual Serialization of the AST ----------------------------------- The actual AST serialization logic is in `slang-serialize-ast.cpp`. The basic approach in both the writing and reading directions is: * Use the `FIDDLE TEMPLATE` system to generate a set of functions, one for each AST node type, that recursively invoke the read/write logic on each field of that node (after recursively invoking the case for its direct superclass) * Use the `ASTNodeDispatcher` system to dispatch out to those functions whene reading or writing anything derived from `NodeBase` * For now, handle all types *not* derived from `NodeBase` by hand. There's a lot of room for improvement around that last item: it should be just as easy to generate the serialization and deserialization logic for other types that don't inherit from `NodeBase`, but the current change tries to err on the side of making the logic as explicit and simplistic as possible, rather than trying to get too clever too soon. The actual serialization *format* used for the AST is almost comically simplistic: the code uses hierarchical RIFF chunks to emulate a JSON-like structure. This is a very wasteful representation (e.g., a `bool` or a null pointer each take up *8 bytes*), but the goal for now is to start with the simplest thing that could possibly work, and only add more cleverness once we are sure it won't get in the way of important future improvements (like lazy/on-demand deserialization or IR and AST, to improve compiler startup times). The files `slang-serialize.{h,cpp}` have been co-opted to define a new pair of types `Encoder` and `Decoder` that are used for a more-or-less stream-oriented way or reading or writing RIFF chunks for the JSON-like structure. Almost everything related to the actual AST serialization could do with a cleanup pass, and some time spent on picking good/better names for everything. Smaller Stuff ------------- * Cleaned up a lot of code that was using bare `ASTNodeType` or the extractor's `ReflectClassInfo` type to consistently use `SyntaxClass`. * Fixed an apparent bug in how the destination-driven code genarator was handling `TryExpr`s * Fixed an apparent bug in how the GLSL legalization pass was handling translation of certain `SV_*` semantics. * format code * fixup: template errors caught by non-VS compilers * format code * fixup: more template errors * fixup: more stuff VS didn't catch * fixup: it's amazing VS doesn't catch these... * fixup: yet more template stuff VS ignores * fixup: more VS template nonsense * fixup: unreachable return macro usage * fixup: more unreacable returns * fixup: unused parameter * fixup: strict aliasing * fixup: allow missing entry point list chunk * fixup: wasm build script * fixup: AST changes since this PR was created --------- Co-authored-by: slangbot <186143334+slangbot@users.noreply.github.com> Co-authored-by: Yong He

Remove support for ad hoc Slang IR compression (#6834)

2025-04-16T19:28:39+00:00

* Remove support for ad hoc Slang IR compression This change is part of a larger effort to clean up the approach to serialization in the Slang compiler. The overall goal is to simplify and streamline all of the serialization-related logic, so that we are left with code that is less "clever," and easier to understand for contributors to the codebase. Removing support for compression of serialized Slang IR has benefits that include: * Reduction in code complexity: consider things like the subtle way that the `FOURCC`s for compressed chunks were being computed from the uncompressed versions, and the mental overhead that goes into understanding that, for anybody who would dare to touch this code. * Reduction in testing burden: there have been, de facto, two very different code paths for serialization of the Slang IR, and it is not clear that the existing test corpus for Slang has sufficient coverage for both options. By having only a single code path, every test that performs any amount of IR serialization helps with test coverage of that one path. * Opportunity to explore alternatives. This is perhaps a reiteration of the first point, but once the code is stripped down to the simplest thing that could possibly work (I am not claiming it has reached that point yet), it becomes easier for contributors to understand, and it becomes more tractable for somebody to come along with an improved approach that performs better (in either compression ratio or performance) while still being maintainable. In my own local setup, I found that removing support for Slang IR compression led to the `slang-core-module-generated.h` file increasing in size from 46.1MB to 47.4MB. This increase in the `.h` file size for the core library binary only resulted in a release build of `slang.dll` increasing from 20.0MB to 20.2MB. Removing the ad hoc compression support has almost no impact on the size of actual binary Slang modules *so long* as the additional LZ4 compression step is being applied to them. * format code --------- Co-authored-by: slangbot <186143334+slangbot@users.noreply.github.com>

format

2024-10-29T06:49:26+00:00

* format * Minor test fixes * enable checking cpp format in ci

Add API for querying and reusing precompiled binary modules. (#3614)

2024-02-22T15:14:55+00:00

Support loading serialized modules. (#3588)

2024-02-15T08:05:51+00:00

* Support loading serialized modules. * Fix. * Fix vs solution files * Fix glsl module loading. * C++ fix. * Fix. * Try fix c++ error. * Try fix. * Fix. * Fix.

Standard library save/loadable (#1592)

2020-11-05T18:43:00+00:00

* #include an absolute path didn't work - because paths were taken to always be relative. * Fix handling of access modifiers inside type definition. * Fix access problem for AST node. Make dumping produce a single function with switch, to potentially make available without Dump specific access. * WIP on serialization design doc. * Remove project references to previously generated files. * More docs on serialization design. * Improve serialization documentation. Remove unused function from IRSerialReader. * Small fixes around naming. Remove long comment from slang-serialize.h - as covered in serialization.md * Remove long comment in slang-serialize.h as covered in serialization.md * More information about doing replacements on read for AST and problems surrounding. * Typo fix. * Spelling fixes. * Value serialize. * Value types with inheritence. * Use value reflection serial conversion for more AST types * Use automatic serialization on more of AST. * Get the types via decltype, simplifies what the extractor has to do. * Update the serialization.md for the value serialization. * Small doc improvements. * Update project. * Remove ImportExternalDecl type Added addImportSymbol and ImportSymbol type Fixed bug in container which meant it wouldn't read back AST module * Because of change of how imports and handled, store objects as SerialPointers. * First pass symbol lookup from mangled names. * Cache current module looked up from mangled name. * Fix SourceLoc bug. Improve comments. * Added diagnostic on mangled symbol not being found * Fix typo. * WIP serializing stdlib. * WIP serializing stdlib in. * Fix problem serializing arrays that hold data that is already serialized. * Remove clash of names in MagicTypeModifier. * Make conversion from char to String explicit. Fix reference count issue with SerialReader. * Add code to save/load stdlib. * Use return code to avoid warning - SerialContainerUtil::write(module, options, &stream)) * Make all String numeric ctors explicit. Added isChar to UnownedStringSlice. Added operator== for UnownedStringSlice to String to avoid need to convert to String and allocate. * Add error check to readAllText. * tabs -> spaces on String.h * tab -> spaces String.cpp * Remove msg for StringBuilder, just build inplace for exceptions. * Check SerialClasses - for name clashes. Renamed Modifier::name as Modifier::keywordName * Handling of extensions when deserializing AST - updating the moduleDecl->mapTypeToCandidateExtensions Co-authored-by: Tim Foley

Serialization design doc first pass (#1587)

2020-10-23T20:39:18+00:00

* #include an absolute path didn't work - because paths were taken to always be relative. * WIP on serialization design doc. * More docs on serialization design. * Improve serialization documentation. Remove unused function from IRSerialReader. * Small fixes around naming. Remove long comment from slang-serialize.h - as covered in serialization.md * Remove long comment in slang-serialize.h as covered in serialization.md * More information about doing replacements on read for AST and problems surrounding. * Typo fix. * Spelling fixes.