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This change includes a lot of infrastructure work, but the main point is to allow code like the following:
```
// define an interface
interface Helper { float help(); }
// define a generic function that uses the interface
float test<T : Helper>( T t ) { return t.help(); }
// define a type that implements the interface
struct A : Helper { float help() { return 1.0 } }
// define an ordinary function that calls the
// generic function with a concrete type:
float doIt()
{
A a;
return test<A>(a);
}
```
Getting this to generate valid code involves a lot of steps. This change includes the initial version of all of these steps, but leaves a lot of gaps where more complete implementation is required.
The changes include:
- Member lookup on types has been centralized, and now handles the case where the type we are looking for a member in is a generic parameter (e.g., given `t.help()` we can now look up `help` in `Helper` by knowing that `t` is a `T` and `T` conforms to `Helper`).
- There is an obvious cleanup still to be done here where the same exact logic should be used to look up available "constructor" declarations inside a type when the type is used like a function.
- Add a notion of subtype constraint "wittnesses" to the type system. When a generic is declared as taking `<T : Helper>` it really takes two generic parameters: the type `T` and a proof that `T` conforms to `Helper`. The actual arguments to a generic will then include both the type argument and a suitable witness argument (both type-level values).
- As it stands right now, a witness wraps a `DeclRef` to the declaration that represents the appropriate subtype relationship. So if we have `struct A : Helper`, that `: Helper` part turns into an `InheritanceDecl` member, and a reference to that member can serve as a witness to the fact that `A` conforms to `Helper`.
- Make explicit generic application `G<A,B>` synthesize the additional arguments that represent conformances required by the generic.
- This does *not* yet deal with the case where a generic is implicitly specialized as part of an ordinary call `G(a,b)`
- A bug fix to not auto-specialize generics during lookup. The problem here was related to an attempted fix of an earlier issue.
During checking of a method nested in a generic type, we were running into problems where `DeclRefType::create()` was getting called on an un-specialized reference to `vector`, and this was leading to a crash when the code looked for the arguments for the generic. This was worked around by having name lookup automatically specialize any generics it runs into while going through lookup contexts.
That choice creates the problem that in a generic method like this:
```
void test<T>(T val) { ... }
```
any reference to `val` inside the body of `test` will end up getting specialized so that it is effectively `test<T>::val`, when that isn't really needed.
- Add front-end logic to check that when a type claims to conform to an interface it actually must provide the methods required by the interface. The checking process goes ahead and builds a front-end "witness table" that maps declarations in the interface being conformed to over to their concrete implementations for the type.
- At the moment the checking is completely broken and bad: it assumes that *any* member with the right name is an appropriate declaration to satisfy a requirement. That obviously needs to be fixed.
- Add an explicit operation to the IR for lookup of methods: `lookup_interface_method(w, r)` where `w` is a reference to the "witness" value and `r` is an `IRDeclRef` for the member we want to look up.
- Add an explicit notion of witness tables to the IR. These end up being the IR representation of an `InheritanceDecl` in a type, and they are generated by enumerating the members that satisfy the interface requirements (which were handily already enumerated by the front-end checking). The witness table is an explicit IR value, and so it will be referenced/used at the site where conformance is being exploited (e.g., as part of a `specialize` call), so it should be safe to eliminate witness tables that are unused (since they represent conformances that aren't actually exploited). Similarly, the entries in a witness table are uses of the functions that implement interface methods, and so keep those live.
- In order to implement the above, I did a bit of a cleanup pass on the IR representation so that there is an `IRUser` base that `IRInst` inherits from, so that we can have users of values that aren't instructions.
- One annoying thing is that because of how types and generics are handled in the IR, we needed a way to have a type-level `Val` that wraps an IR-level value: e.g., to allow an IR-level witness table to be used as one of the arguments for specialization of a generic. The design I chose here is to have a "proxy" `Val` subclass (`IRProxyVal`) that wraps an `IRValue*`. These should only ever appear as part of types and `DeclRef`s that are used by the IR.
- One annoying bit here is that an IR value might then have a use that is not manifest in the set of IR instructions, and instead only appears as part of a type somewhere.
- I'm not 100% happy with this design, but it seems like we'd have to tackle similar issues if/when we eventually allow functions to have `constexpr` or `@Constant` parameters
- Make generic specialization also propagate witness table arguments through to their use sites (this is mostly just the existing substitution machinery, once we have `IRProxyVal`), and then include logic to specialize `lookup_interface_method` instructions when their first operand is a concrete witness table.
All of this work allows a single limited test using generics with constraints to pass, but more work is needed to make the solution robust.
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* Checkpoint: interface conformance work
- Add explicit definition of `saturate` for the GLSL target, which calls through to `clamp`
- Needed to add explicit initializer to `__BuiltinFloatingPointType` to allow initialization from a single `float`, so that the `saturate` implementation can be sure that it can initialize a `T` from `0.0` or `1.0`.
- This triggered errors in overload resolution, because the logic in place could not figure out that the `T` of the outer generic (`saturate<T>()`) conformed to the interface required by the callee.
At this point I have the call to the scalar `clamp()` getting past type-checking, but not the vector or matrix cases.
* More fixups for overload resolution inside generics
- Make sure value parameters are treated the same as type parameters: we only want to solve for the parameters of the generic actually being applied, and not accidentally generate constraints for outer generics (e.g., when checking the body of a generic function).
- Make sure that the diagnostics stuff uses the correct source manager when expanding the location of a builtin.
* Fixes for function redeclaration
- Handle case of redeclaring a generic function
- Enumerate siblings in the parent of the *generic* not the parent of the *function*
- Add logic to compare generic signatures
- When generic signatures match, specialize functions to compatible generic arguments before comparing the function signatures
- Fix redeclaration logic to *not* detect prefix/postifx operators as redeclarations of one another
- Build an explicit representation of function redeclaration groups
- First declaration is the "primary" and others are stored in a linked list
- Make overload resolution handle redeclared functions
- Only consider the primary declaration and skip others
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Fixes #23
Up to this point, the compiler has used the ordinary `String` type to represent declaration names, which means a bunch of lookup structures throughout the compiler were string-to-whatever maps, which can reduce efficiency.
It also means that things like the `Token` type end up carying a `String` by value and paying for things like reference-counting.
This change adds a `Name` type that is used to represent names of variables, types, macros, etc.
Names are cached and unique'd globally for a session, and the string-to-name mapping gets done during lexing.
From that point on, most mapping is from pointers, which should make all the various table lookups faster.
More importantly (possibly), this brings us one step closer to being able to pool-allocate the AST nodes.
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This is in preparation for using `Name` as a type name.
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Just like the previous change did for declaration keywords, this change uses the lexical environment to drive the lookup and dispatch of modifier parsing.
This allows us to easily add modifiers to Slang, even when they might conflict with identifiers used in user code (because the modifier names are no longer special keywords, but ordinary identifiers).
There was already some support for ideas like this with `__modifier` declarations (`ModifierDecl`) used to introduce some GLSL-specific keywords (so that they wouldn't pollute the namespace of HLSL files).
The new approach changes these to be actual `syntax` declarations (`SyntaxDecl`) with the same representation as those used to introduce declaration keywords.
Because many modifiers just introduce a single keyword that maps to a simple AST node (no further tokens/data), I modified the handling of syntax declarations so that they can take a user-data parameter, and this allows the common case ("just create an AST node of this type...") to be handled with minimal complications.
This also adds in a general-purpose string-based lookup path for AST node classes, that should support programmatic creation in more cases.
Statements are now the main case of keywords that need to be made table driven.
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The existing parser code was doing string-based matching on the lookahead token to figure out how to parse a declaration, e.g.:
```
if(lookAhead == "struct") { /* do struct thing */ }
else if(lookAhead == "interface") { /* do interface thing * }
...
```
That approach has some annoying down-sides:
- It is slower than it needs to be
- It is annoying to deal with cases where the available declaration keywords might differ by language
- Most importantly, it is not possible for us to introduce "extended" keywords that the user can make use of, but which can be ignored by the user and treated as an ordinary identifier.
That last part is important. Suppose the user wanted to have a local variable named `import`, but we also had a Slang extension that added an `import` keyword. Then a line of code like `import += 1` would lead to a failure because we'd try to parse an import declaration, even when it is obvious that the user meant their local variable. This would mean that Slang can't parse existing user code that might clash with syntax extensions. This issue is the reason why we currently have keywords like `__import`.
A traditional solution in a compiler is to map keywords to distinct token codes as part of lexing, which eliminates the first conern (performance) because now we can dispatch with `switch`. It can also aleviate the second concern if we add/remove names from the string->code mapping based on language (the rest of the parsing logic doesn't have to know about keywords being added/removed).
The solution we go for here is more aggressive.
Instead of mapping keyword names to special token codes during lexing, we instead introduce logical "syntax declarations" into the AST, which are looked up using the ordinary scoping rules of the language.
Depending on what code is imported into the scope where parsing is going on, different keywords may then be visible.
This solves our last concern, since a user-defined variable that just happens to use the same name as a keyword is now allowed to shadow the imported declaration for syntax (this is akin to, e.g., Scheme where there really aren't any "keywords").
This also opens the door to the possibility of eventually allowing user to define their own syntax (again, like Scheme).
For now I'm only using this for the declaration keywords.
With this change it should be pretty easy to also add statement keywords in the same fashion.
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- `ExpressionSyntaxNode` becomes `Expr`
- `StatementSyntaxNode` becomes `Stmt`
- `StructSyntaxNode` becomes `StructDecl`
- `ProgramSyntaxNode` becomes `ModuleDecl`
- `ExpressionType` becomes `Type`
- Existing fields names `Type` become `type`
- There might be some collateral damage here if there were, e.g., `enum`s named `Type`, but I can live with that for now and fix those up as a I see them
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- The big change here is that all the definitions for syntax-node classes have been macro-ized, to that we can do light metaprogramming over them
- The use of macros for this has big down-sides, but I'm not quite ready to do anything more heavy-weight right now
- The macro-ized definitions can be included multiple times, to generate different declarations/code as needed
- The first example of using this meta-programming facility is a new visitor system
- The actual visitor base classes and the dispatch logic are all generated from the meta-files
- There was only one visitor left in the code: the semantics checker, so that was ported to the new system.
- All current test cases pass, so *of course* that means all is well.
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